Jonathan portfolio

Hi my name is Jonathan and I am going into 7th grade. We made some circuits and we started Arduino. We learned cool ways to use leds and buttons. We also worked on programming. I liked this class because I got to learn a lot about electricity and programing. Also, we get to take the Arduino home. We made many cool circuits and overall, the class was fun.

The Basics You can compare an electrical circuit to a water pump. In the water pump analogy, the pump adds pressure to the water. Lets say it adds 5 psi (psi stands for pressure). There is a big pipe that transports the water and does nothing to the water pressure. But lets say there was a bend in the pipe. It lowers the pressure. The entire thing is like a circle. The bottom of the circle has 0 psi. This means that the bend lowers exactly 5 psi. Now lets go back to the circuit. The pump symbolizes a battery. As the pump increases pressure, the battery increases volts. The big pipe is like a wire and also affects nothing. The bend is a resistor and the resistor lowers volts.

Programming There are three sections in the Arduino. The top, void setup, and void loop. The top is where you declare variables. A variable is a number that can change. Most variables are integers. The range of the integers is -32,000 and 32,000. Although Arduino prefers whole numbers (integers), it can take decimals. This requires a new kind of variable called a float. Most variables are connected to pins on the Arduino. These require a kind of program called pinMode. In pinMode, you declare whether a pin is an output or an input. Now the void loop is where you do the interesting stuff. This where you use outputs such as a led. A led is a light emitting diode. A diode is a piece of a metal that allows a current to travel only one direction. Using the correct programing, you can make the led turn on when ever you want.

My Ultrasonic Range Finder An ultrasonic range finder is a device/machine that can find out how far away an object is from the machine with sound. It has three main components. It has a sensor, a display, and an Arduino. The sensor sends out ultrasonic sound waves that bounce off an object and comes back. It makes some calculations using how long it took for the sound wave to return to the machine. It uses that and tells you how far away an object is from you. The display is what tells you the distance using 4 7 segment lights. The Arduino is what does the calculations. I like how it is pretty simple to program and make yet it is so cool and useful.

Sound We made our second project on sound. What we were supposed to do was to make 6 leds flash with the music. We had to do lots of programming, declare lots of variables, and type lots of pinModes. We connected the 3.5-millimeter audio jack to the breadboard. We also connected the speaker to the breadboard. Then we connected the Analog pin A0 to measure the voltage. But there was a huge problem, the voltage went negative. In order to fix that, we used diodes. As mentioned before, a diode only allows current to travel in one direction. Then we attached the leds and it was over. It was cool in the end and I liked it a lot. http://tny.cz/62bc5c9c