In this lesson, we will build upon what we’ve already done by adding a servomotor. Remember, my goal was to simulate a railroad crossing by having two flashing LEDs for the signpost, two LEDs for the crossbar that drops down across the road, and the bar itself to lower and…

In this lesson, we will build upon Lesson 6 by changing our code to make the pushbutton act as a toggle switch. What that means is that previously, when we pressed the button, the LEDs lit and when we released the button, the LEDs turned off. The desired behavior for…

Okay, so in the last lesson, we learned to use a pushbutton to have our LEDs start blinking. The code used the delay(int millisecondsToWait) function to create the blinking effect. However, I noticed that when the button was released, the way the code was written, the delay for HIGH and…

In this lesson, we will create a simple build using a pushbutton and 4 LEDs. I’ve got an idea for a project that would simulate a railroad crossing with a flashing signal, a buzzer for the siren, and a crossbar that lowers and raises with the press of a button.…

So far we’ve been writing digital signals to control an LED. Today we will use analogWrite to do it in a similar way, but now we will use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) over an analog pin. I highly recommend watching Paul McWhorter’s video on PWM for a detailed explanation of…

In our last lesson, we set up three LEDs and wrote code to blink them on and off, using variables to represent the different digital pins. We basically copied and pasted the code in order to blink an LED the number of times we wanted. Today, we are going to…

In my last post we recreated the simple Blink program from Arduino using the built-in LED on the board. The program simply turned the LED on for one second and then off for a second. Today we will add three LEDs to the breadboard, along with resistors to keep the…

Hi guys, I’m back after a loooonnng break from the blog. I’m sitting here on self-quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 and thought, dang, I’d like to get the Maker Daddy blog up and running again. So, here I am. It’s been so long since I’ve played with the…

I remember back in the day when my father had two remote controls for the television, me and my younger brother. “Howard! Change the TV to channel 5.” I also operated as the television tuner by going outside and turning the antenna until I heard him shout to stop. My…

I recently ran across an Instructable where the author showed how he had created a record player from paper. I thought that was pretty cool and decided to make something similar for myself. But rather than using paper and turning the record by hand I wanted to use one of…