The last day of the intensive was all about making a unique firefly, by modifying its responsive behaviour. In order to achieve this we had to change the code and wiring for each firefly. What I wanted my firefly to do was to respond to a light source and turn a multicoloured LED on. It worked via a bit of altering in the code and makeshift wiring. The latter was too improvised, that when I got home it just did not work. Which gave me a good excuse to take everything apart and start over, this will help me learn more about how the Arduino works and gain more knowledge until the next intensive.
The last day was also about learning how to power our Arduino with a battery. This seems like a really needful thing to know specially if one is thinking about doing installations or works that require the board to be on its own. For this we needed a 9 Volt battery, a battery plug and a soldering kit. This was my first time soldering job, so I was quite nervous but with the help from others in the lab it was not as difficult as I thought.
The multicoloured LED has four legs out of which one is the ground and the rest are either red, green or blue. Each leg can then be connected into a pin number on the Arduino board and code thus resulting on a multicoloured display.
After three days of fun with the Arduino, I can get a broad sense of how things work and an idea of what each element in the in the starter kit does. I will be experimenting with other exercises and posting about results.
