Friday, April 1, 2011

D, I & E Intensive Day 3

Today we started by getting everyone's critters working on a millis timer and then went on a field trip to the Belcconnen Jaycar electronics store. We then set up our Arduino microprocessors to be powered by 9V batteries (previously we had been powering by USB - 5V) so that they could be more portable. This required soldering a 9V battery cap to a power plug.

A team effort to solder
Ground and positive connections to plug
Battery powered portable critter
So that we didn't have to continually unplug the critter, we also set the knob to be a sound off switch - that is if it's input value was below 10 no tones were made. Finally the annoying critters were quiet! 

Then our tasks were to make our critters unique. I synchronised the LED (blink) to the tone duration, and set the light sensor to make the tone duration shorter and frequency higher in darker conditions. Finally we let our critters loose on a play date and found that some emergent patterns were discernible!

Critter play date


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