Hello, I’m Jalal and I’m a rising Jr. at Vanguard College Prep. Academy, for my starter project I picked the Drawdio; I chose the Drawdio because it required soldering which is a good skill to have. The Drawdio is mostly hardware; for my main project I did the 8×8 LED light display. I chose this because it was mostly coding which is something I’ve been interested in. If you would like to do this project yourself, here are my Mechanical drawings and Documentaion
Main Project: LED light display
Milestone 2: Modification to initial code
After completing the initial project I wanted to play around with different displays. As such I created different codes that made displays that interested me like the ones shown in the video.
The way the LED light display works is buy a lot of coding. After I make a code I send the code to the board (Rainbowduino) and the board then tells the 8×8 LED matrix to light up in the way I made the code.
Milestone 1: Project works!
I made an LED light display for my main project. This project requires A LOT of coding so if you are looking for some “wiring fun” don’t get your hopes up too high. The rainbowduino is an awesome piece of hardware though, it is basically plugin and light up, this makes is extremely easy to work, although I had a tough time with that..due to the fact I had placed the 8×8 matrix plugged in backwards for some time, also I forgot to place in the rainbowduino libraries into the files so that may have been a setback as well. After some difficulties with that I had the board working and lighting up a default light, this is where the coding comes into play, for beginners like myself I think the best way is to get a example code and look at the code and see how it works maybe see how the code would work in your head. Imagine LED s lighting up and see what patterns it would make, then plug it in into the rainbowduino and see how it lights up and if the LEDs light up exactly how you thought then that’s awesome, then try messing around with the code and try to make your own remake of the code. I find it that you will learn more if you study the code first before tampering with it.
Starter Project: Drawdio
I made the Drawdio v1.1 for my starter project, the project was easy to make but you can learn a lot more if you think about how it works. The Drawdio works because of 3 main components: the capacitor, resistor, and the 555 timer. The capacitor works by blocking the low frequency signals; this only happens when the 555 timer switch is open. The capacitors discharge when the 555 timer switch is closed. Therefore allowing the signal to flow to ground. The difficult part was to find out what mode is the 555 timer, there are actually 3 of them: Monostable, astable, and bistable. I know that the timer isn’t monostable due to the fact that this isn’t a constant stream of signal. I then thought it was bistable considering that then you write it makes a sound like a switch, but after some research I found out that when bistable is turned on it goes on and on. so that just left astable which goes on and off continually making a digital sound and making the arduino work! A good thing to look out for is not to solder your parts in backwards, that is very important and can stop the WHOLE project from working correctly!