Week 2 - Circuit 2 - Potentiometer

This week’s project involved building another simple circuit that was, basically, an upgrade to last week’s circuit. This circuit created a blinking LED, but included the ability to control blink rate via a potentiometer otherwise known as a variable resistor. The code I used for that circuit can be seen in the screenshot below.

This is a picture of the circuit itself.

Here’s a picture of my schematic for the circuit.

Below is my video of the project, with my usual commentary.

Here’s my vlog commentary about this challenge, how I worked through it, and my final reflection. There wasn’t much difficulty this week, at least not with the circuit itself. For those who don’t want to watch the video, I’ll include a text explanation below the video.

Notice! The text below is a rough transcript of the content of the video above. You are welcome to peruse both or just one.

So, this week’s challenge, at first sounded like it would be more challenging than last week’s. However, after studying the schematic in the Arduino guide, I realized that it was just an extension or upgrade of last week’s circuit. Once I realized this, everything having to do with the circuit was much easier than anticipated. One difficulty I had with the circuit was that it simply did not want to work. I checked everything and could find nothing wrong. Instead of trying to trace out wires for a 4^th time, I decided to go ahead and pull it all apart and re-build the circuit from scratch, triple checking the orientation of the potentiometer. It all worked great.

The real challenge I had this week came before I got to that part of the project, however. I had not used my Arduino since before this summer. So, I did not have my original IDE software installed and had to download the newest version when we started this class. Apparently, Arduino has made some changes to their code library format requirements. When I downloaded the USK Guide Code library, the new IDE did not like it. It kept insisting that it was invalid. I checked online to see if others have had the same problem. They had! And, the fix was what I had thought about doing before I went and checked for a solution. What I read was: remove the library and all associated files from the IDE program folder and place them somewhere else, independent of the Arduino files. I did this, reset the Arduino itself, uploaded the code to the Arduino. No more invalid library error code.

The extension challenges were interesting and somewhat of a challenge, but not enough to cause me real difficulty. That will come with some of the later circuits.

Where do we find potentiometers in real life? They are everywhere. Volume controls, light dimmer controls, electric motor speed controls, etc. There is a particular application that I am going to try out for myself in the next few months. Our son will not ride a bicycle. He just sits on it and pushes it around. Recently, I discovered boosted boards. They are essentially extra long, motorized skate boards with remote controls. I thought about buying one for our son and adding a handle bar to compensate for his lack of coordination, but then found out the price. WAY OUT OF OUR BUDGET!!!! But, I figure I can build one with some of the electric motors and other parts we have lying around. I plan to use a potentiometer, attached to one of the handle bar grips, to control the speed of the motor. This way, the whole project would cost very little, would be safer than a regular boosted board, and would give our son the motivation to get out and move more, In fact, I might just set it up with really large wheels so that he can ride it off road, instead of needing to get out in the street.