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

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.

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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.

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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.

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Yeah, people had a ton of fun making the LEDs blink and fill in with different colours and patterns. Expanding on that, and, as you said, providing more of a basis regarding “if” and “for” would be great! Everyone was excited with patterning their LEDs with solid colours, so showing them how you could also iterate over colours (and not just pixel ID’s) would be great.

Thanks for organizing and hosting this! I think the attendees got a lot out of it. :slight_smile:

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I’m pretty sure the arduinos with driver problems were some that we know
worked on other laptops. I think it was likely an OS problem as one laptop
was an old mac. Another was running Windows 8.1 so likely just some
tinkering with settings will solve the driver problem. I had just set one
of them up on a laptop running Windows 7 Enterprise with no issues (lol
except it was Windows 7).

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At the event we were using a Windows 10 laptop and an old HP Hackintosh with OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. The latter can only run Arduino IDE 1.0.6. It worked perfectly with an official Arduino Mega 2560 but did not detect an OSEPP Uno R3 Plus.

Both worked perfectly on the Windows 10 laptop with Arduino IDE 1.6

Ian

(Sent from a mobile device. I apologize for the brevity.)

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I really enjoyed this event. I’ve been playing with my own LED light strips at home and have come up with this practical use…cat mood lighting…;). My cat can now count in binary as well.

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Ahmed was arrested for bringing a homemade alarm clock to school?

I wonder why?

Did it look anything like this maybe? :

Everyone needs a hobby, and humor is a very personal art form…

No, it didn’t look anything like that. It was an overblown story to start; let’s not make issue of it again.

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Jeff,

no, it was old digital alarm clock from Radio Shack, which Ahmed had
removed from its original case, and put into a wooden pencil case.
It wasn’t even a clock kit that he had assembled himself.