Shitty Amateur Electronics - Part 3 - Hello, world!

Time to get the obvious starter circuit out of the way. Yes, I made an LED. A flashing one, actually. No, there’s no need to document it.

And of course, once you can do one LED you can do five. Of many colours! And then you learn about forward voltages (essentially how much the LED uses) and how different colours pull different voltages & current and require different value resistors to be as equally bright as each other. Sooner or later I’m going to have to learn about calculating this kind of thing myself, although I’ll have to reach far back into the old, dusty areas of my brain first. I think I’m looking for the GCSE area... Adding a switch to this project was the next step, as was proving to my wife that this hobby wasn’t just a flash in the pan by leaving her a little surprise for her to find in the morning.

I actually amended the code driving the GPIO pins to turn it into a game with a randomly generated pattern of lights. You hit the switch when the green light in the middle is hit. Frankly I wish I’d have gone straight to a project like this, and if you’ve got any prior knowledge you may want to as well. Otherwise it feels a little boring. All the output goes to the console right now, but I have ideas for that.

I’m going to put this circuit aside for now as I have plans to preserve it for posterity. I’ll cover that in later posts.

One other thing I did use my kit components for was to write a more complex series of sequences to emulate a pedestrian crossing. It follows the standard sequence used in the UK and had some random timing to it after you push the button. It even has a beeper! I did start to find my breadboard a bit small at this point, and I’m sure there are ways to get better at utilising the space. Or I can buy a bigger one, obvs. If I need a bigger one for something then that’s the time when I’ll buy it.

I’ve been using the open source tool Fritzing for documenting all of my work. It’s clunky to use though and the networks of wired and components sometimes get a bit muddled up from what you really want to do with them. Connections seemingly get invented which puts a component or junction somewhere you don’t want. This got frustrating and was a pain to fix.

Oh, it also crashed. A lot.

But it was decent enough and if it’s stable for you I found it quite easy to use. It can also do PCBs, and I’ll probably post about that later if I get that far along.

For now though I’ll pause here. Next time I want to talk about what I’m going to do with that game circuit.