Arduino starter kit project 4 – Color Mixing Lamp

In project 4, a technique called Pulse Width Modulation (PMW) would be used. PMW rapidly turned the output pin high and low over a fixed period of time.

In this project, I would use three photoresistors and detected the amount of light that hit them. Each of them would be covered with three different colored gels as filters – Red, Green, Blue, so the red filter passed only red light, green filter only passed green light, and blue filter passed blue light.

Also, this time I would use a RGB LED, a LED with RGB colors. The project’s idea was to use PMW to show how strong the light of Red, Green, and Blue detected, and output to the RGB light based on the reading. this was my first time playing with photoresistor, so I was kinda excited about this experiment.

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Arduino starter kit project 3 love-o-meter

Arduino Starter Kit Project 3 – Love-O-Meter

The name of this project sounds fun. This time I would have to use a temperature sensor, and read the analog signal from the sensor. Base on the temperature, it would turn on number of lights. If temperature was below 20C, no light would be on. From 22C to 24C, one LED would be on. From 24C to 26C, two LEDs would be on. For temperature greater than 26C, all LEDs would be on. However, I think there was a mistake on the code in the instruction manual. The code was working fine, but when playing with different temperatures, first LED would not turn off if temperature was below 22C and above 20C. It might be just a minor error, or maybe it supposed to be working like that. It was just a hand on experience, so I guess anything would be fine.

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Arduino start kit project 1 and 2

Just started my Arduino Start Kit project. Follow along with the instruction manual, and built some simple circuits.

Project 1 was a hand on experience on how to work with switches, resistors, and LED. It also explained the differences on parallel circuit and series circuit. No need to load any program. I had experience about those when I was in college, so I had no difficulty building them.

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Project 2 was little bit more fun because this time I would load up a program into Arduino. Since it was like a introduction, and programming was my strong field, so it was a pretty quick built and working instantly.

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Dim Sum Labs HackJam – Ryan Alexander, Gustavo Huber, Daven Rauchwerk & Thomas Deckert

Most of my friends in Hong Kong are non technical background, so last week I searched on the web and did my first Meetup in Dim Sum Labs for HackJam meeting.

My intention at first was looking for other web developers that may have similar background and share some experiences. However, in fact that Dim Sum Labs is a place that gathering people with different background, and they are people who have passion for building and hacking electronic gadgets, or the willingness to explore the future technology that could possibly change our life one day…

Yesterday, was my 2nd meetup in Dim Sum Labs, and they had guests from San Francisco. Ryan Alexander, a brilliant programmer, to demonstrate his work.

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Seaquence, built in flash platform, was an experiment in musical composition. Adopting a biological metaphor, you can create and combine musical lifeforms resulting in an organic, dynamic composition. http://seaquence.org

Cubeteam was a 3D voxel modeler. UI was like Minecraft, and you were able to build 3d Model online and exported them in many formats. https://cubeteam.io/

Ryan also demonstrated his stereographic for the his photo. http://notlion.github.com/streetview-stereographic

Next guests were Gustavo Huber, Daven Rachwerk and Thomas Deckert, a Team who is developing a Ansel – The Hackable Camera. They showed us their work, and their goal that this hackable camera they wanted to achieve. I could not believe I did not take any photos of their prototype camera. It was a cute prototype! and soon they would be in Kickstarter. You can find more information here: http://ansel.io/

Last guest was Samuel Au. He showed us his KOPI KBAR 8 port USB charger, a USB charger that can charge devices at maximum speed.

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Although it was only a USB charger, the intelligent behind it was great. you can connect it with your tablet for checking the current being used while charging the device. you can see how people were eager to test it out in the pictures!

Even though I ended up back home after midnight, it was a great event. Now I have became their member (by paying monthly fee), and I am sure I can meet more great people and learn more from them there.

So what’s next? I am going to order my arduino board and build something!

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