Stand with Ahmed Arduino Binary clock Workshop #IStandWithAhmed - Sunday Sept 20th, 2015 3:30pm

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

When:
Sunday Sept 20th, 2015 at 3:30 pm till 6pm

Cost:
$10 Please RSVP here Stand with Ahmed Arduino Binary clock Workshop #IStandWithAhmed Tickets, Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 3:30 PM | Eventbrite

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.

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

Helpful links

2 Likes

I will provide a prize for the clock that looks most like a bomb.
PS Not a ‘F*ck You Stephen Harper’ t-shirt, though if you want one…

I’ll also add a prize - a device Ben built when he was in Elementary School
we used for playing games (…and so much more!!)
Once the button is pressed it ‘ticks’ every second then beeps every minute
for three minutes.
Intended as a chess clock.

[image: Inline image 1]
[image: Inline image 1]

1 Like

@funvill, what is a binary countup clock?

Are there pictures/video of what the final product would look like?

Nope, I need to do that… Friday… night…

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.

1 secs = 1
2 secs = 01
3 secs = 11
4 secs = 001
5 secs = 101
6 secs = 011
7 secs = 111
10 mins = 1001011
60 mins = 11100001
8 hours = 11100001
30 days = 10011110001101
365 days = 111100001001100111

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.

It’s a great idea, thanks for organizing.

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 “water drop effect,” a bit like this:

There could be a drop each second, filling up a column of “water.” When the
column is full, have a different colour indicating the accumulation in the
bottom.

I updated the VHS site with details and a video from @funvill.

Here is a video of the result of the workshop (Note the timer is set to 300ms instead of 1000ms)
https://instagram.com/p/7w2y4DA5YG/?taken-by=funvill

Here is the source code for the workshop

Feedback is always welcome.

Only 4 spots left! Come join us on Sunday for a fun afternoon of clock building and tinkering.

Hi Janet

Is this a “family friendly” event suitable for capable pre-teen girls?

Regards

Ian

Hi Ian - Yes! Please come along - very family friendly and it would be
great to see your girls at the space. Cheers, Janet

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 Lee’s before the workshop and pick up a few more.

The prize for the clock that most resembles a bomb will be a Nootropic Video Experimenter Arduino Shield!

I will drop it off in the dropbox tonight. I probably won’t be able to make it down, so the group can just vote on the winner.

Awesome!

https://instagram.com/p/739e2pA5Z7/?taken-by=funvill

https://instagram.com/p/739UfLg5Zm/?taken-by=funvill

Thank you @Janet @lukecyca and @Shane for the help running the workshop.

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 uno’s 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 didn’t 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 “IF”, “FOR” statements and variable deceleration. The theory part about “what is binary” and “how to count in binary” was lost by most people.

People had a lot of fun making things blink, Most people didn’t care about making a clock they just wanted to play with the colors and make things blink. Next time I run this workshop I don’t 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.

6 Likes

If they bought the discount Arduinos, there’s a warning on the vending machine about the ftdi. Arduino has no reason to fix knock off problems.

@funvill Thank you for a great workshop. I attended with my two pre-teen daughters. This was their first “physical computing” 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.

We’re quite sure the binary clock code we used isn’t actually counting up in binary correctly… but it will be a fun exercise to fix that.

To all involved, thanks for a fun afternoon.

3 Likes

I’m 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 didn’t have problems connecting them to their computers.

1 Like