Saturday, January 14, 2023

The program...



I have always considered computer programming to be way out of my wheelhouse.  I seem to have quite a blind spot when it comes to any kind of programming language.  A while back I ordered some inexpensive microcontrollers to try with my rover project but found I didn't need them right away.  I thought I had lost them when I cleaned up a couple of weeks ago but now they are found.  While doing what seems to be my daily clock search on the internet, I came across a lot of digital clock tutorials and have been binge watching them for 2 weeks.  This morning I tried my hand at the Arduino IDE [Integrated Development Environment - software for building applications that combines common developer tools into a single graphical user interface (GUI)] and was magically able to get an ESP8266 Node MCU to run a sample "blink led" program and after I made some changes to the code - it ran that too.  What I have discovered is that it may actually be doable for me to make some interesting things with these as there is so much info available online...especially YouTube.  Now that I got my feet wet, I ordered some more controllers, OLED displays, and stepper motors to experiment with for some new clock projects.  To get an idea what I mean by inexpensive - that order (5 controllers, 5 screens, 5 stepper motors) was $46 on Amazon.  If I didn't mind waiting a month, I could have ordered them all from China for about 25 bucks.  For scale, the board I fired up is about 1" x 2" - the boards and OLEDs I just ordered are about 1.25" x 1.25" and the stepper motors are 1" in diameter.  67,75,30,0,C

1 comment:

Jeff said...

Here's link to Boing Boing store with Arduino search:
https://store.boingboing.net/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=Arduino