Project: Blinking and Beyond

Objectives and Overview

This lesson extends the blinking LED project by adding extra challenges. You’ll start with a review of the basic Blink sketch and then have several challenges to expand your skill.

Lesson Objectives

• Review how the Blink sketch works.
• Extend the skills that you learned in the previous lessons by completing the Arduino experiment challenges.

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Blinking and Beyond

You’ve already set up your Arduino board and uploaded the basic, introductory Blink sketch. This sketch is considered the “Hello World” of Arduino. However, now it’s time to dig into the code and make some modifications.

Fun Challenge: Look up the origin of the phrase “Hello World” and tell one of the program staff!

Core Activity

Make an LED blink! This is the first activity for nearly everyone who works with an Arduino.
In case you moved away from the Blinking LED project page, here’s a breakdown of the supplies and steps to get started:

Supplies

Here are the supplies that you need:

• Uno board & USB cable
• 1 jumper wire
• 2 LEDs
  • No need for a resistor…yet!

Steps

1. Connect the Uno board to your computer and make sure that the port and board are selected in the Tools menu.
2. Open the basic Blink sketch and copy the code.
3. Create a new sketch:
   1. File → New
   2. Name your sketch something like “My First Blink” and click Save
4. You’re ready to start exploring! Check the next section for suggestions which pieces of the code you can experiment with.
   • Don’t worry about permanently ‘breaking’ anything with code changes. The worst case is that you re-copy the original Blink code.

Blinking and Beyond: Experimenter Challenges

Several of the projects that you’ll be working with throughout this camp will have additional challenges that you can do _after_ completing the basic project steps. These are designed to test (and push) the skills that you developed during the lesson and project. This is the first of these challenges!

After you’ve successfully uploaded the basic Blink sketch and your LED is blinking, you can now move into the additional Experimenter Challenges!

Feel free to integrate one (or all) of these:

• Must-Do: Change the pin that the LED is in. Remember the tips and considerations for this!
• Must-Do: Experiment with changing the delay rate.
• Can-Do: Experiment with adding 1 or 2 more LEDs.
• Can-Do: Combine everything and make a multi-LED blinking pattern with different delay patterns.

Have fun experimenting. Your Arduino journey has now officially started!