Cylon Eye
The Cylon LED Blink project was the first thing I ever made with my arduino. It is basically a row of five LEDs that iterate back and forth turning on or off. This gives it the appearance of a Cylon's "eye" or visor for you Battlestar Galactica fans. For the older gurus here, it also looks a lot like KITT's "eye" from Knight Rider. For this project you will need:
- Arduino and USB cable
- Prototyping board / Breadboard / Non-Solder Project board / PCB board (if you don't mind spending the LEDs for a little fun)
- Five red LEDs
- Seven jumper wires
Building it
Firstly, lay your prototyping board down and attach the LEDs. LEDs are polar components and must be inserted in the correct orientation to function properly. If you look at the LED, one leg should be longer-- this is the positive (anode) end of the LED. Each anode must be inserted into a seperate row of the prototyping board so we can apply current to individual LEDs. For instance, on my protoboard, each numbered row is common; all the holes in row 17 for example are connected to one another. This means that each anode much be in a different row than any other. However, the shorter leg of the LED (cathode) is what we are going to ground; this end of the LED should corrospond to a flat edge on the LED casing. These ends of the LEDs can all share a common point running to ground. Here is a photo of my protoboard with the LEDs.
Notice that all the LED legs on the left side of the red line (anode/power) on the protoboard are all on different rows. The legs on the right (the cathode/ground legs) are all common as I connected the two long columns between the red and blue lines with the white jumper at the top. This means that anything connected between the red and blue line are running to ground. Next step is to attach jumper wires beside each anode leg on the left. These jumpers run to pins 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 on the Arduino. Note that (on the Duemilanova) pin 13 has a built in LED on the Arduino board itself. Also, you cannot have anything plugged into the pins 0 and 1 while you upload a program. You can always ue these pins after the program has uploaded (I learned this the hard way). Once you have your LED jumpers plugged in, run another jumper from anywhere on the grounding pad to the GND pin on the arduino.
The final step is to upload the code to the arduino. Now, if you thought ahead, you probably uploaded the code before you bogged down the arduino with wires-- I sure didn't. If you like, you can remove the jumper wires from the arduino microcontroller for the time being and reinsert them once the code is uploaded. So, plug the arduino into your computer via the USB cable and fire up the arduino IDE. Open up the project file downloadable from this website below, and upload the code to your Arduino. If you get any errors, chances are that you need to configure the IDE to use the correct COM port for the microcontroller; help for any issues that arise can be found here. Once the code is uploaded, (reattach the wires in the correct order if you removed them) and sit back and enjoy your work!
