Project Goal: Create a robot light show using an arduino microcontroller. Working together with my partner Nick, we decieded to create a keyboard using buttons, a peizo buzzer and leds that play the song that we played in the build a band project. Along with this, we also created an lcd display that displayed lyrics that we had made up to go along with out song, also from the build a band project.
The Keyboard:
Starting this project, we felt fairly confident about our ability to complete said project. Later, we realized we were wrong. As the main person for this project, I had come up with the idea of an arduino keyboard early on. I completed the hardware with help from nick on the first day. Unfortunatly, that was the easy part. The tricky part was the programing. After trying and failing to learn how the arduino code editing platform worked well enough to complete the keyboard, I looked to the internet to find a very similar project but without the leds. After editing it for my purposes, I combined with a button that turned on an led code that was built in to the aduino software. Next, since my programming knowlege was still small, I did a lot of trial and error, eventually creating a very nice end result. Below is a video of the project playing morning mood.
LCD:
The second part of our robotic art show was an lcd that displayed stem based lyrics that we created during the build a band project that went along with the song morning mood. Nick, who did all of the work for this part of the project, first used a helpfull circuit diagram that told him how to set up a small lcd display. Next he started the grueling process of creating a code that would display a syable of the song for a duration of time before swithing to the next one. This process took a lot of time because it involved typing out the same command each time we wanted a new word to appear on the screen. Next was alot of trial and error changing the duration of the text so that it would link up with the music. In the end was a really cool end product under a huge mess of wires. Below, you can check it out playing three verses of our custom stem based morning mood lyrics.
Overall thoughts:
After doing this project, I gained a new respect for programmers. At the start, I new almost nothing about programming but after looking over countless code made by other people and edited by myself and felt like I could program a basic code from scratch with no help. Still, not only is programing knowing what phrasing will do what you are thinking, it is looking over the hundereds of lines of code you just wrote, clicked compile and got an error message to try and ind one missing semicolon. Afet making code with only a few lines, I can feel bad for programmers that make software with millions of lines of code. During this project, nick and I had countless episodes where we spent hours trying to do something, followed by a loud bang of our heads hitting the table because we gave up. The next day we would scan over the code an immediatly find the problem and fix it. If you get only one thing out of this page, arduinos are awesome, really educational and alot of fun but, you may just get a concusion.