Maker Space Week One: The Blinking LED

The Blinking LED

This week, we completed a circuit challenge to make an LED blink on and off. This was a more straightforward challenge, which was good because it took a while to get all of my components arranged correctly. 

PROJECT VIDEO LINK

This week’s code

This week’s journal entry

Picture of working circuit

Circut Play

1. What happens if you turn the LED around (reverse the wiring)? I originally laid out my board this way, and the light didn’t work. 

2. What happens if you remove the positive lead from the breadboard? Does the circuit still work? Yes, it still works. However, if you remove the negative wire, the circuit will stop working. 

3. What happens if you place the resistor to the positive side of the LED and simply used a wire to run back from the LED to ground? When you do this, you will need to change up the wiring a little so check this closely to make sure you have not shorted out the circuit. Moving the resistor to the negative side of the LED the circuit stops working. The resistor is there to prevent too much energy burning the LED out.

4. What happens if you move the wire from port 13 to port 12 on the Arduino? The circut stops working because the code is written for pin 13

Code Play

1. If you moved the wire from port 13 to port 12 on the Arduino, what do you need to change in the code? You would need to rewrite the code to be pinMode(12, OUTPUT);

2. What happens if you change the two delay code lines from delay(1000) to delay(2000)? Take out a stop watch or timer of some sort and time the rate of blinking for each of these settings. How many times does the LED blink in a minute for each of these settings? What have you learned about the value that is placed between the parenthesis after delay()? What value (parameter) would you place in delay() if you wanted the LED to blink at a rate of once every 3 seconds? How about every half second? The 1000 makes the loop pause for one second, 2000 would be two seconds, 3000 would be for 3 seconds. The smaller the number the faster the loop will run, so 500 would be a half second. 

1. What happens if you place // before the words void setup()? Adding // will make this a comment, and the code will not work; you will get an error message when you verify the code.

2. What happens if you place // before the words void loop()? Adding // will make this a comment, and the code will not work; you will get an error message when you verify the code.

3. What happens if you remove the last curly brace “}” in the program? The code will break.

4. What happens if you place a // before pinMode(13,HIGH) in setup()? Adding // will make this a comment, and the code will not work; you get an error message when you verify the code

5. What happens if you changed HIGH to high on the pinMode(13,HIGH) line? The code will not work, and you will get an error message when you verify.

6. What happens if you change the word pinMode to pinmode in pinMode(13,HIGH)? The code will not work, and you get an error message when you verify.

Extension Challenge

For the extension challenge, I added an LED bulb and had it blinking at a slower rate than the original bulb. I included this video clip for reference. 

Challenge Code