GyroSpiro
A Digital Whirlygig written in C
Materials
(1) An Arduino
(2) A single LED
(3) The Arduino IDE
The Arduino Integrated Development Environment is simple and easy to use! Download it here
Setup
- If you're an Arduino first-timer, follow the setup instructions for your partiular operating system here.
- (...HERE is a handy set of installation info for Mac OS X)
- With Arduino board in hand, push one metallic 'leg' of the LED light into DIGITAL PIN 13 and let the other 'leg' pop into the neighboring pin.
- Make sure your Arduino is tethered to your laptop via USB connector, and that the Ardunio IDE is open. Hit Cmd+N to create NEW instructions for it, and paste the Gyro code in!
- Hit UPLOAD and watch the magic!
Details
The Arduino has input channels, output channels, and power. The input channels, or PINs, are conductive metallic pins awaiting electronic data - in this case in binary 1111101010100101010. We can send 0 and 1 signals using C with the commands digitalWrite LOW and digitalWrite HIGH. The LED receives these as Off and On signals.
When we send these Off/On signals at a certain pace, the LED gives us the illusion of spinning like a gyroscope does.
This work (Gyro, by Aheri Stanford-Asiyo), is free of known copyright restrictions.