Student gallery
A selection of students’ final projects from Intro to Arduino are posted below.
Spring 2023
A little model house whose lights turn on automatically when it’s dark outside.
A mechanism that drops some candy using a motor.
A cool cardboard demo showing how a camera’s iris mechanism works.
A little wheeled robot that spins around until it sees a bright light ahead of it.
A laser distance sensor sees where a user’s hand is, and uses two servo motors to point at it.
A simple voltmeter that displays how much voltage an attached battery provides.
Fall 2022
A little smiling robot that waves when you put your hand over its head.
A simple magnetic field detector increments a series of three LEDs when a magnet comes close.
Spring 2022
A simple alarm with an alarming textual message.
A round LED strip soldered to two linear LED strips, adjustable using a potentiometer.
A lamp that moves its shade when you get near. (And then it sort of falls apart.)
A ping pong paddle with sensors on it that detects when you hit the ball with light, medium, or high force.
RFID cards that trigger a song to play when they’re brought close to a detector. (Since this video has no sound you’ll just have to take my word for it).
Fall 2021
A simple distance display unit, reading the user’s hand using a laser ranger and categorizing it on a scale of 1 to 4.
A trash can lid that flips open when a user approaches.
Fall 2020
A homebrewed stand mixer that uses an infrared ranger to adjust the speed? I don’t understand but I’m into it.
A machine to coach your cadence and force for administering CPR properly.
Spring 2019, section A3
A custom light-up hula hoop!
A breathalyzer that displays the current level of detected airborne alcohol.
A pedometer that displays a daily goal, the number of steps towards the goal, and beeps at the 25%, 50%, 75%, and completions of that goal.
A machine that waters a plant when the soil is too dry.
An electronic rock-paper-scissors game for two players. The result is displayed (and a running score is tallied) on an LCD screen.
A machine to make tea. A steeping time is set, and the bag is moved up and down while it’s brewing. Once it’s done, the bag is pulled out of the mug, a little completion song plays, and an LED lights up to indicate that it’s ready to drink.
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.
