Arduino Projects For Dummies

Chapter 4

The All-Seeing Eye

In This Chapter

Powering and controlling LEDs

Using arrays and loops

Counting time

Using a potentiometer to control speed

If you’ve never made an Arduino project before, this is a good place to start. In this chapter, I go over the basic steps in building any Arduino project, writing the code, and spicing things up a bit once it’s all working.

If you’re reading this book, you likely have a soft spot for science fiction, like me. This project was inspired by long hours of reruns from 1980s science fiction on TV. I’m thinking of Battlestar Galactica — with its Cylon Warriors, and Knight Rider with KITT, the advanced car with a personality. For me, KITT was the star of the show, not David Hasselhoff! Both the Cylons and KITT had one thing in common — what passed for “eyes” more or less consisted of a horizontal band of lights that cycled back and forth — an electronic all-seeing eye. In this project, you build just that, using a series of light emitting diodes (LEDs). You can also change the behavior of the lights to emulate a cinema marquee or bouncing ...