A selection of students’ final projects from Intro to Arduino are posted below.

Fall 2018, section A2

A remote button-pusher by Mahnoush Babaei It’s a bit difficult to tell from the clip, but there are two Arduinos here; the one on the right is connected to the pushbuttons, while the one on the left is connected to the two small solenoids. The Arduinos are only linked through a radio module. When the Arduino on the right feels a button pushed, it sends a signal to the one on the left to fire that solenoid. The purpose: Mahnoush wants to be able to remotely press the buttons on her thermostat at home!

An EMF detector by Rachel Alexander Electromagnetic frequency waves (EMF waves) are invisible to the human eye, but lots of electronic devices in our everyday lives emit EMF fields. This detector uses a loosely coiled wire as an antenna; when a higher-power wave is detected, the LED indicators move from blue, though yellow, to red. In this case, a computer charging cable (plugged in at the far end) is brought near the antenna as an EMF source.

A game of Snake by Brandon Wang Two joystick controllers, plus an 8×8 LED matrix, make a two-person version of Snake. Each player tries to get the other player to lose, without crossing their body. The blue LED shines at the end to indicate that a player has lost.

An automated scanning rangefinder A small infrared rangefinder is mounted on to the end of a servo motor. The motor scans a broad range in 5º intervals, and at each point records the distance of the closest object. After scanning the whole scene twice (back and forth), it then points straight towards the location that had the closest object seen.

A gradual-lighting alarm by Mahnoush Babaei A “real-time clock” module allows an Arduino to know the time of day accurately, and a small OLED display shows the time of day and allows the user to set an alarm. (All of that functioning was copied by the student straight from an existing well-elaborated project found on Instructables.) This version of the project adds a bright light (two LEDs here serve as a stand in) to the alarm: 15 minutes before the alarm time is set, the lights begin slowly to get brighter and brigher, until 10 minutes after it is set they are at full brightness.

A skateboard with side glow by Ethan Rich An Adafruit Pro Trinket drives two programmable LED strips attached to the sides of a motorized skateboard. Three AA batteries power the LEDs.