PhysicalPixels is a collection of basic Arduino sketches used in HackPittsburgh's Intro to Programming the Arduino workshop.
HackPittsburgh has held several workshops dedicated to teaching attendees the ins and outs of the Arduino microcontroller platform.
One workshop, Intro to Programming the Arduino, walks through the process of building up an Arduino sketch from scratch. At the end, this sketch reads values from three potentiometers and uses them to control the red, green, and blue intensities of a light-emitting diode using pulse-width modulation. The sketches in this package represent the progression of concepts as introduced in the workshop.
Photos of previous workshops are available at my Flickr page or the HackPittsburgh Flickr Pool.
- An Arduino (http://arduino.cc)
- Arduino 0017 (http://arduino.cc)
I've tested these sketches Arduino 0017 on Mac OS X 10.6.4, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and nothing else.
Note: In specific, I have not tested these sketches with the latest Arduino 1.0! They do build, however, and I've reviewed the porting guidelines to ensure that any issues have been addressed.
Refer to the installation instructions on the Arduino website to install the development environment.
No installation is specifically required to build and run these sketches short of placing this
entire repository, directory structure and all, in a subdirectory of the Arduino sketchbook named
PhysicalPixels.
There should be plenty of online documentation describing this process.
- Open the Arduino environment
- Connect your Arduino board to your computer
- Select the proper board type and communication port in the Arduino environment
- Open the specific sketch to be run from the sketchbook
- Press play
The usage of each individual sketch depends on the functionality it exposes. See below.
These sketches fit the progression of HackPittsburgh's Intro to Programming the Arduino workshop. The specific details regarding the circuit used in each step as well as the code progression are contained within the workshop slides.
To obtain the workshop slides, they may be downloaded from my Dropbox archive.
A brief description of the sketch progression is provided below.
HelloArduino- The basic Arduino example, blinks the built-in LED on pin 13DownToTheWire- ChangesHelloArduinoto blink an external LED instead of the built-in LEDBreakfastSerial- Adds serial debug output toDownToTheWireLiveUpToYourPotential- Adds potentiometer input reading output toBreakfastSerialDontFadeAway- Adds red LED PWM output setting toLiveUpToYourPotentialFinishingTouches- Adds green and blue LED output setting toDontFadeAway
No unit tests are provided with the source distribution at this time.
To uninstall PhysicalPixels, simply remove the PhysicalPixels directory, subdirectories, and files
from the Arduino sketchbook.
There are a few things I'd like to do:
- Build and test this with Arduino 1.0
- Dave Findlay
- Marty McGuire
- Jon Speicher (jonathan@hackpittsburgh.org)
- Matt Stultz
- Initial release
- Arduino 1.0 compatibility
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.