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Introduction
In this lesson, let’s try something a little easier – gradually changing the luminance of an LED through programming. Since the pulsing light looks like breathing, we give it a magical name - breathing LED. We’ll accomplish this effect with pulse width modulation (PWM).
Components
- 1 * SunFounder/Arduino Uno board
- 1 * Breadboard
- Jumper wires
- 1 * LED
- 1 * Resistor (220Ω)
- 1 * USB cable
Principle
PWM
Pulse width modulation, or PWM, is a technique for getting analog results with digital means. Digital control is used to create a square wave, a signal switched between on and off. This on-off pattern can simulate voltages in between full on (5 Volts) and off (0 Volts) by changing the portion of the time the signal spends on versus the time that the signal spends off. The duration of "on time" is called the pulse width. To get varying analog values, you change, or modulate, that pulse width. If you repeat this on-off pattern fast enough with an LED for example, the result is as if the signal is a steady voltage between 0 and 5V controlling the brightness of the LED. (See the PWM description on the official website of Arduino).
We can see from the top oscillogram that the amplitude of the DC voltage output is 5V. However, the actual voltage output is only 3.75V through PWM because the high level only takes up 75% of the total voltage within a period.
Here is an introduction to the three basic parameters of PWM:
Duty cycle describes the proportion of "on" time to the regular interval or period of time.
Period describes the reciprocal of pulses in one second.
The voltage amplitude here is 0V–5V.
Experimental Procedures
Step 1: Build the circuit:
Step 2: Program (use the code below and copy paste it into the Arduino program)
Step 3: Compile the code
Step 4: Upload the sketch to the Arduino Uno board
Here you should see the LED gets brighter and brighter, and then slowly dimmer, just like breathing.
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