So the official assignment for Physical Computing class this week was to first connect digital input and output circuits to the Arduino microcontroller and then to come up with “our own physical interface for a combination lock”. I put those words in quotations because it is not 100% certain that the little doohickey that I created actually fit those instructions. You didn’t hear that from me, though.
Our initial assignment involved lighting up two LED inputs with one switch. My little addition was to replace the first switch with wires add another switch (again, in the form of wires) then change the code so that closing the circuit for switch 1 caused the green LED to light up and closing the circuit of switch 2 caused the red LED to light up. Not touching either caused…well, it caused nothing to happen. Yes, that’s right, not doing anything results in nothing happening. Stay tuned for more wise words from me.
Those spindly green and orange wires are acting as the respective switches right now. They are nice and colorful and most importantly, correctly wired. This blurry little gem of a video shows proof of that, because the LED inputs actually turn on when the wires touch.
What the video doesn’t show is the game that the roommates and I created out of it. I made fancy little buttons that consisted of paper and aluminum that said PLAYER 1 and PLAYER 2. And then a trivia question was asked, but each respective player had to “light in”–aka buzz in– before he or she could answer. It was loads and loads of fun and we played for hours and afterwards everyone marveled over my technical proficiency and praised my wonderful wit. And then I woke up from my dream.
But seriously, the game thing was real. Real fun, too.