In this post I’m going to talk about what I consider a robot (and not a robot), cover some of the basics to start with robotics, and give some examples from a successful class I have been leading at a local makerspace.
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I’ve shown you how to use shift registers to drive an LED grid, including how to draw pictures on the screen from memory. Now we’re going to use those tools to make a game similar to the classic Tetris. I’ll show you the circuit, how to draw pieces, how to create animations, respond to user input, and more. Learning how to build complex behavior from simple parts is a great start to thinking about how robots behave.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRMLTCeAd7y
In recent posts I’ve covered how to use LEDs and how to use shift registers and even how to combine shift registers and LEDs to control numeric displays. In this post we’re going to use 64 LEDs in an 8×8 LED grid.
In previous tutorials I showed how to use seven segment displays, how to use shift registers and how to daisy chain shift registers, and talked a bit about persistence of vision. In this tutorial we’re going to combine shift registers and seven segment displays to make an Arduino control two four-character seven-segment displays, a task that (at first glance) might not seem possible.
The first time using a new microcontroller is what I call funstrating, especially if you don’t have clear instructions. We’ve done the hard work of figuring out the NodeMCU drivers and NodeMCU Arduino IDE setup for you. Read on for the two steps that have to be done only once. More helpful info at the end, too.
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