First Site 3 Workshop – Arduino by Blinkenlights

Posted 08 February 2010 | learning

We had our first workshop yesterday: Arduino by Blinkenlights.

The goal of the workshop was to put together a lxpl light board, and learn enough of the basics of the Arduino environment to control it. We had limited space, but just enough for six participants to assemble the kits with help from Seth and Jonathan.

The light boards have 16 individually addressable RGB LEDs, controlled with a shift register and LED driver. They’re designed to be easy to assemble, using only through-hole parts. Most of the workshop participants had not soldered much before, if at all, so this was a great beginner project to get people comfortable with assembling electronic components.

Before the assembly started, we talked about how the circuit works and went over what the parts are and what they do. After the kits were completed, we tested the boards with a simple Arduino program. Although we didn’t get much time to work on the software control side, the soldering lesson and practice was definitely worth it, and there will be more time in the future to work on writing software for controlling the light boards.