Robot Art Show
Giselle & Grace
Description:
This project was completed in partner pairs. I worked with Grace. The goal of our project was to program a piece of art to hopefully please robots when they *someday* take over the world, in hopes of sparing our lives. We chose to program a series of lights to blink in Morse code, "SMHS STEM." As the lights blinked, we had an LCD screen attached to it that spelled out what we were saying while showing the dots and dashes that made up each letter. This project took around three weeks, and we ended it off by presenting to our class in a gallery walk. A video of the circuit working, a document containing all of the code, a picture of a hand-drawn diagram of the circuit, a picture of the actual circuit, and a write-up on an experiment I did about electromagnets are included below.
Materials:
27 wires
green LED
blue LED
yellow LED
red LED
4 330Ω resistors
Piezo buzzer
Potentiometer
2 breadboards
Content:
At the beginning of the project, we learned about circuits and how they worked. We then slowly transitioned to learning about electromagnets, currents, batteries, and voltage. Then we went back to playing with circuits using this new information, and started to familiarize ourselves with the different parts by doing Arduino experiments. These were a series of circuits that we put together to do different things, like make sound, blink LED's, and press buttons to show words on a screen. These experiments led us to figure out our own coding.
Ohm's Law: v is the voltage, i is the current, and r is the resistance (v=ir)
Kirchoff's Laws: Current Law- The sum of the currents going into a connection must equal the sum of the currents leaving the connection. Voltage Law- The sum of the voltages around a circuit must be equal to zero.
Coulomb's Law: Force of attraction/repulsion between 2 static charges is proportional to their charges and inverse to the square of the distance between them (F = kq1q2/r²)
Circuit: A complete loop of conductive material from one side of a power source (+) to the other (-)
Series Circuits: Circuit with single path and multiple components, 1 after another, all on the same path (rtotal= r1 +r2 +r3+...)
Parallel Circuits: Circuit with branches each with separate path for flow of charge/electrons (look for choice of "path") (1/rtotal= 1/r1 +1/r2 +1/r3+...)
Current (i): Flow of charge/electricity through the circuit, measured in Amps (v=ir)
Voltage (v): Potential energy difference from one side of component to the other side, measured in Volts (v=ir)
Resistance (r): Amount current is slowed or resisted through an obstacle, measured in Ohms (Ω (v=ir)
Power (p): Rate of transferring electrical energy through a circuit, measured in Watts (W=J/s), (p=iv, p=i²r, p=v²/r)
Takeaways: Through this unit, I've learned that coding is a powerful language, but it's also very finicky. With very little experience with coding previously, it was pretty hard to jump into it. Gratefully, I mostly did the wire part of the project while Grace did the coding. Overall, coding in general was frustrating because every space, letter, and bracket mattered but at the end, it felt good to finish it knowing that we worked hard to accomplish something.
Reflection:
This project involved me doing a lot more because there were only two of us rather than the normal 3-4 person groups we were used to having. I think I did well in creativity. This Robot Art Show project involved a lot of coming up with our own ideas. I think we had to be pretty creative to come up with the whole Morse Code idea, so I'm proud of that. I think I did well in Collaboration as well. I think the less people in a group, the better for me because it pushes me to do more of the project and work harder.
Although I think this project went fairly well, something I could have done better on was character education. I think the project would have gone more smoothly if I made a greater effort to learn about the coding and how the breadboards work rather than going through a bunch of trial and error.