Electricity is beautiful and powerful physical effect. We can use computers and programming to tame it. Programming is one of my favorite things to do. Combining programming and physics (specifically electricity) makes for an even more exciting challenge for me! In the following Youtube videos, I demonstrate some simple but fun examples of what you can do with an Arduino microcontroller and some electronic prototyping equipment. My personal project was to learn how electricity works and how to manipulate it with a few simple tools.
Arduino is an open source microcontroller that makes electronic prototyping easier, yet gives you many more capabilities thanks to the fact that you can program the microcontroller and tell it what to do. The software I wrote to make these wasn't more than a few lines, but it was neat to know what was going on thanks to my previous experience in web programming.
The first simple Arduino experiment I made was an LED activated by a pushbutton.
The second is an LED activated by a light sensor. Way cool, and the Arduino code behind it was fun to write.
