Week 8 - Journal

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As always the first step was building the circuit in tinkercad, piece by piece and testing each step along the way.

However I couldn't find the bluetooth module HC-05 among the components available in tinkercad, so I simulated the receiver and sender pins by 2 resistors to have most of my circuit drawn on tinker cad before building it in real life.

Although I should have added a resistor to each segment of the display instead of having just one at the common cathode, the number of resistors I had in the kit wouldn't have been enough so I used the less efficient but available connection method.

The seven segment display is used to display the initials of the colors that are shown, which are in order from left to right: Red, blue, green, yellow, violet, and Cyan.

After this stage comes the coding stage, I used VS code to write the code then I copied and pasted it to Tinker cad to perform the simulation.

The First step in the code was defining the variables.

In the setup I configured the pin modes to be outputs and started out the serial monitor.

In the loop, I created a code that runs only when the serial receives something, when the serial doesn't receive anything that means that the method Serial.available() returns a 0, and when it receives some input it returns a 1 and the code runs.
You can read the serial once in each loop however so I saved the return of the Serial.read() method into a variable called reading.

Whenever a character of the initials of the colors is read by the serial monitor it performs 3 function based on the character given.

The first function is "*color name*light" and it lights up the LED by the desired color according to the numbers declared.

The second function is called "off" and just turns off all the segments of the display to get read to display the next character.

The last function is "*color name*disp" which displays the initials of the color on the seven segment display.

As always I started out by building the electronic circuit to be an exact copy of the one I created on Tinkercad.

With the exception of adding the bluetooth module this time and connecting it to the VCC and the ground.

The next step was to get the arduino code I tested from tinkercad where it was tested and into the arduino IDE to be uploaded via USB.

The next step was the pairing process between the phone and the bluetooth module HC-05.

To control the bluetooth module you need an app the provides the connection on the backend and provides a simple and intuitive GUI at the front end, so I downloaded an app called "" from the google play store.

After the pairing was complete I chose the device I want to connect to, in this case it is the bluetooth module from within the application itself.

Then I changed the button names to reflect the characters I wanted to send to the Arduino

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