In a time when government funding for sciences is dwindling, workshops that encourage youth to take an interest in science and technology are essential for the future of Canada and the world.
Increased knowledge of technology helps to avoid fearful reactions to creative thinking and technological innovation, such as the case of Ahmed, a student recently arrested in Texas for bringing a homemade clock to school.
Please join at VHS to build your very own homemade clock.
Who:
Anyone that is interesting in making a clock.
Where:
The vancouver hackspace 1715 Cook street #104
Workshop
In light of recent events, in this workshop we will building a binary countup clock using a Arduino (https://www.arduino.cc/), and a string of WS2812 RGB LEDs, and two buttons.
In this workshop we will be going over the following topics.
Running the blink example project. This ensures that the arduino IDE and the arduino are working and talking to each other. https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Blink
Equipment.
Please bring your own laptop. VHS does not have any spare laptops for you to use in this workshop.
Parts
All of the parts for this workshop will be available for you to borrow free of charge for the workshop. You can also bring your own equipment or you can also purchase the parts from VHS and take them home with you if you like.
Arduino and programing cable if required. (Arduino pro mini are available for $15 in the vending machine)
30 LED string of, WS2812 RGB LEDs (A 30x LED 1 Meter strip can be purchased for $12 CND)
Mini breadboard ($5)
2x A button (free)
2x resistors to debounce the button (free)
A laptop. You must bring your own laptop for this workshop. We do not have any to spare.
5V 1 Amp power supply ($20)
Where to buy the parts from
http://leeselectronic.com/ We 3> Leeâs Eletronics. Buy your parts from them. They are local and will have all the parts used in this workshop.
Iâll also add a prize - a device Ben built when he was in Elementary School
we used for playing games (âŚand so much more!!)
Once the button is pressed it âticksâ every second then beeps every minute
for three minutes.
Intended as a chess clock.
A strip of LEDs that count up in binary after being plugged in. The LEDs will illuminate based on the time in binary. Each strip has 32 pixels or 32 bits.
Depending on the group of people that show up I may add several advanced features such as
A button to set a time and count down.
A millisecond timer that is a different color that runs in the background of the LED strip.
etc⌠(please suggest others)
The goal of this project it to get people started with LED strips and as a PR event to piggy back on #IStandWithAhmed. I am doing the simplest project possible that can be considered a clock.
It would be cool to use color for something, it could represent the season
(blue green yellow brown = w,s,s,f), the current weather if more advanced,
or just use random colormaps.
I would love to add this kind of feature, The problem is that the stock Arduino does not have a Real Time Clock (RTC) or an internet connection to use (NTP)⌠Over time this count up clock WILL lose time. approximately 16 sec a day. Its not a good time keeping device.
You can always suggest that as a future project students learn how to use a real time clock module or maybe even just a GPS module to keep the time set properly ( clock module is probably the cheaper option )
As an alternative, you could create a âwater drop effect,â a bit like this:
There could be a drop each second, filling up a column of âwater.â When the
column is full, have a different colour indicating the accumulation in the
bottom.
If anyone has 5V FTDI programmers, could you bring them down to the hackspace tomorrow?
I thought that I had four but I can only find two of them. I will try and head to Leeâs before the workshop and pick up a few more.
8 out of the 10 people that signed up on event bright, showed up. Each donated the suggested about of $10, for a total of $80. I donated $40 of that money to VHS. I also sold a bunch of LED strips for $12 for non members and $6 for VHS members. 4x Arduino unoâs were purchased from @iMakeRobots vending machine.
Of the 8 people, 2 peoples laptops would not install the FTDI drivers. One of them used my laptop (in application locked mode) and the other shared with his son. We still are having issues getting the drivers install on everyone computer. I would have expected most of these issues to be resolved by the latest update of the Arduino IDE.
With the exception of the 2 laptops that didnât install the drivers. We had everyone running the blink sketch within 15 mins. This is a huge improvement over the last Arduino workshop that took ~2 hours to get people up and running. A smaller class size and the help from @Janet@lukecyca and @Shane made a huge difference.
As we progressed thought the workshop I realized that I should spend more time teaching programming fundamentals like the âIFâ, âFORâ statements and variable deceleration. The theory part about âwhat is binaryâ and âhow to count in binaryâ was lost by most people.
People had a lot of fun making things blink, Most people didnât care about making a clock they just wanted to play with the colors and make things blink. Next time I run this workshop I donât think i will include the clock portion of the workshop and just show more ways to make the LEDs blink.
With Halloween coming up, I think my next workshop will be about how to embed LEDs into costumes.
@funvill Thank you for a great workshop. I attended with my two pre-teen daughters. This was their first âphysical computingâ event and they were excited to show off their new skills back home.
They were impressed just how easy it was to change the code to create different patterns in the NeoPixel strip (as was I!) and they wanted to spend more time doing this. To capture their attention for a straight 2.5 hrs is impressive.
Weâre quite sure the binary clock code we used isnât actually counting up in binary correctly⌠but it will be a fun exercise to fix that.
Iâm not sure which Arduinos they bought from the vending machine, but I think they were all bought near the end of the workshop and people didnât have problems connecting them to their computers.
