Technical Exercises

The course text includes has many exercises intended to familiarize you with the lab, basic electronic equipment, and basic programming. These are essential for developing the vocabulary and skills to fulfill the projects. They are generally reviewed on a pass/fail basis.

The initial exercises are intended to be quick, simple introductions. Part of the exercise is absorbing a set of technical terms; the meaning will become apparent in time through immersion in practice.

Please be sure to read the sections Summary Guide: Basic Circuits and Summary Guide: Arduino Microcontrollers for a review of terminology and concepts.

Anyone who completes an exercise easily should consider undertaking more of the optional challenge activities listed at the end of most exercises.

Raspberry Pi Pico

• Servo Motion with the Pico. Introduction to hobby servos and programming practice in CircuitPython.

• Digital I/O with the Pico. Introduction to digital input and output in CircuitPython.

• Analog Sensing with the Pico. Introduction to analog-to-digital conversion in CircuitPython.

Storytelling Machines

• Kinetic Toy. Parametric 3D design of a laser-cuttable kinetic play device.

• Mechanical Puppet. Free-standing puppet system with human-operated control mechanism.

• Motor Puppet. Free-standing puppet system with gearmotor actuation.

• Programmed Puppet. Free-standing puppet system with microcontroller.

Marble Runs

• Marble Run Tile. Parametric 3D design of a laser-cuttable marble run.

• Marble Fidget Toy. Handheld marble device fabricated using 3D printing.

• Actuated Marble Run Tile. Marble run tile including hobby servo actuation.

• Marble Lift. Marble run incorporating DC gearmotor to lift balls.

• Reactive Marble Run Tile. Marble run tile incorporating single-bit sensing.

• Motor Marble Run Tile. Marble run tile incorporating DC gearmotors.

• Marble Game. Playable electromechanical game using marbles.

• Marble Music. Musical instrument using marbles.

Arduino IDE and Programming

• Arduino Introduction. Basic description, finding Arduino software.

• Coding, Compiling, Deploying. Running several sample programs, modifying code.

• Soft Blink. Introduce several programming fundamentals by fading the onboard LED.

Elementary Electronics

• Bench, Battery, Grid. Electrical safety, voltage measurement.

• Continuity Tests. Resistance measurement.

• Power Switch and LED. Voltage and current measurement, controlling current with a switch.

• Voltage Divider Basics. Introducing Ohm’s Law via our essential analog circuit: the voltage divider.

• Smoke a Resistor. Testing Ohm’s Law empirically by destroying a resistor.

• Sensor Switch Basics. Applying the voltage divider to the simplest sensor: the switch.

• Photocell Sensor. Applying the voltage divider to a light sensor.

• LED Current Limiting. Applying the voltage divider to regulating LED current.

• Reflective Photointerrupter. A sensor circuit with both current-limited LED and biased phototransistor.

• Electrical Theory Practice. Paper self-test for solving basic circuits.

Arduino with Electronics

• Read Switch Input. Read a switch input as a binary digital value.

• Read Analog Accelerometer. Read a multi-channel sensor and explore calibration.

• Sensor-Driven LEDs. Control LED brightness using sensor data.

• Read Sonar. Measure distance with an ultrasonic ranger; explore time as an output variable.

• Servo Sweep. Drive a servo motor along simple trajectories.

• Metronome. User-controlled metronome.

• Tactile User Interface. Multi-sensor user affordance.

• Unipolar Drivers. Driving solenoids, relays, large lamps, and unidirectional DC motors.

• Multi-channel Driver. Generate sound and vibration using a power driver.

• H-Bridge DC Motor Driver. Driving DC motors in both directions at variable speed.

• Stepper Motor Driver. Driving a stepper motor for precise open-loop motion.

Signals and Time

Please be sure to read the Summary Guide: Computation and Behavior section for a review of computational terminology and concepts. Please be sure to see the OneInOneOutASCII Arduino Sketch section for background on dividing a process between the Arduino and a laptop.

• Event Loop Programming. Structuring software as event-loop time-slicing for executing multiple simultaneous tasks.

• Resolution and Mapping. Using a smoothing filter for reducing noise in sampled analog input.

• Music Sequencer. Demonstration of a state-machine interpretation of performance data with musical audio output.

• Input Hysteresis. Introduces state transition diagrams.

• Input Pattern Matching. Comparison of several canonical coding forms for state machines.

Mechanism

Please be sure to read the Summary Guide: Mechanism section for a review of mechanical terminology and concepts.

• Clay Linkage. Making a four-bar linkage from air-drying clay.

• Laser Cutting Features and Tolerances. Basic laser cutter design; introduction to engineering tolerance.

• Mechanisms for One-Bit Sensing. Using mechanical elements effectively to apply switches as sensors.

• Electromechanical Oscillation. Combining mechanical and electrical feedback to produce dynamics.

In-Class

• Interview Game. Getting to know each other.

• Hand Choreography. Developing a domain-specific choreography language.

• Network Party. Live networked interaction using custom tactile user interfaces.

Optional Topics

More Electronics

• Voltage Regulation. Creating stable power supply voltages.

• Capacitance. Basic capacitor dynamics and simple RC timing circuit.

• Op-Amp Level Translation. Applying gain and offset to analog signals.

Modular Components

• Adafruit-PWM-I2C. Using an I²C bus for 16 channel of PWM actuation.

• WS2801-LED-SPI. Using an SPI bus to drive digital LED modules.

• MPU6050-IMU-I2C. Using an I²C Inertial Measurement Unit.

Raspberry Pi

• Getting Started on the Raspberry Pi. Preparing to apply a network-capable computer to physical computing.