This is
Sungi's HTMAA Journal

Tenth Week

November 15, 2023

This was
The Tenth Project

Output Devices

Connect, Read the Diagram Chart, Rereard the diagram chart, Fix your connections. Repeat until you have a final project

Summary:

Today, we will be using our board in order to create outputs. In this week, we focused on creating a buzzer effect and light output. We did two sets of lights - normal LEDs and matching individually addressable LED strips. For our final project we would not be using the individual diodes, but they served as a good stepping ground to understand GPIO pins.

Tools

Software
  • VSCode (had errors pushing to PicoW)
Hardware


WARNING WARNING WARNING

If your name begins with N- and ends in -EIL GERSHENFELD, do not continue below:

.... There are breadboards.....

I like breadboards...Please dont fail me.

WARNING WARNING WARNING


Design - Buzzer (Vibratory)


First, we have to understand what buzzers are. They are essentially purposely imbalanced motor weights. In our case, we do not need them to be bidirectional, so we simply need to input voltage and let them run. This was ALOT simpler than I thought it would be to implement.
We simply connected this to a breadboard in order to validate our theory and used the ADC pins on our PICO W.

Vibrator

HOWEVER, I was not satisified with our individual learning so we moved onto LEDs. Using the first LED, we pushed normal diodes then into larger LED strips.
This was alot more challenging as an individual project because my EE is extremely weak (admittedly so). It took us an embarrasingly long time to understand that we needed resistors on the LED. Additionally, we also did not know that the LEDs were DIRECTIONAL. DIRECTIONAL!!!
This was a great learning point for me because it set me up to make sure that I learned that the WS2812 was also single direction for information.

SINGLE LED

Multi LED

We used a Aruino Library called FastLED. This saved us a ton of time understanding the logic behind the WS2812. We defaulted to white lights (identified class). Afterwards, it was a simple For loop and playing around with timings to get the effects we wanted.

Our code basically relied on timing sequences and understanding how many lights keep on simultaneously in order to create a "light runner" effect. Once we got the wiring correct, this turned out to be a really fun project!