Week 12 Interfaces and Apps

Overview

I took a few different approaches to tackling this week's assignment.

First, I wrote an arduino program that interfaces the input and outputs for my final project, allowing a user to trigger a set of red LEDs to illuminate by introducing a signficant impact force from an accelerometer. Specifically: shake the board with the accelerometer on it, and the lights will turn on.

Then, because I wasn't sure whether we had to have a digital interface as well, I set out to create the simplest interface possible that would interact with my SAMD21 devkit board. I used TA Leo's files to do this, available here: github.com/leomcelroy/fab-notes/

Shake-to-illuminate

The goal for my final project is to cause a set of LEDs to light up red if a digital egg "breaks," meaning if it experiences enough force on impact that a real egg would break if dropped from the same height.

This means that my accelerometer must communicate with my LEDs.

In order to achieve this, I wrote some code in Arduino (with Quentin's help). I included the appropriate libraries, and used an if/then function to trigger the LEDs to pulse with a glow effect when the accelerometer's linear acceleration registered above a specific (relatively arbitrary for now) threshold.

Second counter

I originally had extremely limited time this week, so here's the quick version of what I did initially:

Go to github.com/leomcelroy/fab-notes/ and download the files there as a .zip folder.
Open Visual Studio Code
In VSC, open the folder you just downloaded and navigate to "web-serial-interface" file.
In a separate window, open Finder (I'm on a mac) and navigate to the same downloaded folder.
Open the embedded.ino file in Arduino IDE.
Connect a board--any board--to your computer. Make sure to select the correct port and board in Arduino IDE, and specify the microcontroller you're using.
Flash the board. This puts a variable onto the board. The program we've uploaded should run a basic counting program that steadily increases the count, which will be visible in the serial monitor and plotter if you open them (but only one will work at a time).
Back in VSC, open the file index.js.
To create a super basic interface that counts how many seconds since the board was plugged in (or flashed), add a timer in Arduino, change the value to 1000 (this will increase the count by 1 second at a time, since it's in milliseconds), and edit the text to a sensical prompt. I went with "Seconds since this board was plugged in:" Also delete the two paragraphs that create the blue dot and white background.

Resources:

Leo's GitHub Files: github.com/leomcelroy/fab-notes/

Interfaces & Applications

Assignment:

Overview

Shake-to-illuminate

Second counter

Resources: