What
Introduction to arduino blink sketch and E-Textiles.
In this workshop we will be going over the most basic arduino sketch, The blink sketch. We will set up the arduino environment, wire an LED to the arduino board, programing an arduino to blink the LED on and off at a programed rate. We will then continue the workshop building on the blink sketch by adding several LEDS and making them blink in different patterns. We will finish off the night with an introduction to E-Textiles and how you can use the blink sketch in clothing.
For the E-Textiles section of the workshop we will be working with a Lily Pad arduino. It is not required that you have a Lily Pad arduino for this section.
An arduino of any variant (Arduino Leonardo, Lily Pad, Arduino Pro Mini, etc…). You can purchase an arduino from LEE’s Electronics on 28th and main. If your ardunio does not have a USB port you will need the programing cable to download code. I will have several demo arduinos available for you to borrow if needed (these are not for sale).
Where
The Vancouver Hackspace
1715 #104 Cook street, Vancouver, BC, Canada
When
Wednesday, April 1st, 2015 @ 7:30pm
Who
Anyone and everyone is welcome. If you are younger than 18 please bring your parent or guardian with you
There will be a $5 workshop fee.
Please RSVP, if less then 5 people RSVP then the workshop will be canceled.
You’re going to hate me for this, but I think we should have a step-by-step
install with screenshots for the Arduino for all the major OSes:
Windows 7
Windows 8
Mavericks
Yosemite
whatever flavours of Linux
I’d suggest maybe a different slideshow that’s also public, so learners can
follow the instructions on their own for their respective platforms. This
will let people install in parallel, instead of us walking through each OS
in series.
Plug in your board and wait for Windows to begin it’s driver
installation process. After a few moments, the process will fail, despite
its best efforts
Click on the Start Menu, and open up the Control Panel.
While in the Control Panel, navigate to System and Security. Next,
click on System. Once the System window is up, open the Device Manager.
Look under Ports (COM & LPT). You should see an open port named
“Arduino UNO (COMxx)”. If there is no COM & LPT section, look under
“Other Devices” for “Unknown Device”.
Right click on the “Arduino UNO (COmxx)” port and choose the “Update
Driver Software” option.
Next, choose the “Browse my computer for Driver software” option.
Finally, navigate to and select the driver file named “arduino.inf”,
located in the “Drivers” folder of the Arduino Software download (not the
“FTDI USB Drivers” sub-directory). If you are using an old version of the
IDE (1.0.3 or older), choose the Uno driver file named “Arduino UNO.inf”
Windows will finish up the driver installation from there.
12 people showed up for the workshop, (1 child, 2 men, 9 females), 1 VHS member, the rest are brand new to VHS, Most had heard about Maker Labs BEFORE VHS. They found out about the workshop on FACEBOOK and word of mouth. No one had come from the VHS’s website.
One person has a arduino from arduino.org, the arduino IDE from arduino.cc declard this as an uncompatable board and caused problems. We got it working but the problems were hard to debug. More information about Arduino.cc vs arduino.org
I am not a MAC guy, I really stumbled with helping people on their MACs
There are no bread boards at VHS anymore, They have all disappeared!.. so we were write wrapping 3 LEDs together and jamming them into the arduino pins. No fun to debug.
We can’t turn off the lights in the space to help with the projector. The projector is not bright enough to work well with all the lights on.
All the VHS public laptops have disappeared or not been unpacked or gone, or something… we could have used one or two.
A few mistakes in the slides causes some people lots of problems (missing pinMode on slide 26)
I should have asked at the start of the workshop what people wanted to make, what they hope to get out of this workshop, also what experiences they had and how comfortable they where with it.
I really hate asking for money at the workshop, instead use picatic to collect the monies before hand.
3 of the 5 demo arduinos that I brought with me where DOA
Good things
Having @wander help with the workshop made everything a lot smoother. Explicitly with resolving installation bugs with the Arduino IDE on different OSs
38 Slides took 3 hours to go though at the workshop, it took me 30 mins to run though while testing them at home. It was the right amount of slides.
People helped their neighbors, this got them talking to each other and reduced the support load on the instructors.
I got to have a beer before the workshop.
I made $50 in workshop fees, $12.5 (%25) that I donated to VHS and the rest I kept.
I didn’t realise you were looking for breadboards. There are some in a box above the soldering stations I think, and I have one or two in my locker from home that I will donate when I’m done with them.
I just wanted to say thank you to the other VHS members at the space who
accommodated the class. In my opinion it was very successful, everyone
appeared to get the basic Arduino sketches working and lit up their LEDs.
Thanks also to those folks who came out. I hope you had fun, and feel free
to give us feedback on what could go better!
