Mine the Harvest

My Arduino arrived just a few days before Easter, and though I’ve been busy with work and school I couldn’t wait to dive into playing around with it. The whole concept of the Arduino, being able to write little programs in C, compile them, then upload then to this little programmable prototyping board – it’s just so cool.

I decided to start by following the great introductory tutorials at the Adafruit.com site, they are so well written and so fun. One of them consists of learning how to program three different LEDs to cycle on and off. By having more than one on at a time, and through using a box to diffuse the light, you can mix the colors to get yellow, purple ect.

Well, that looked like fun, and as I was constructing it I realized that it would be a perfect Easter Egg, the colors diffusing and illuminating it. I wired up the schematic, modified the sample source code to blink and mix as I wanted it to, compiled it and uploaded it to the Arduino. I made a little paper box and filled it with tissue as shown on the adafruit.com site. As I made the box I drew some easter egg style symbols, and some other stuff, on each face of the cube. Once fixed up it worked pretty darn good and I presented it to Syd as her E-aster Egg!

Here is a little ogg video of the finished project:

E-asterEgg

(If that does not work here it is in mpeg4 too)

If you would like to learn more about the Ardunio, see this wiki article which has some information on getting started and links to some great resources.

Syd really liked her digital colored egg. I’ll have to come up with some more projects to make for her, but I sure it won’t be too difficult to come up with ideas, the Arduino is a remarkably versatile little gadget.