Today we built our first circuits on a breadboard.
A breadboard is used to try out electronic circuits and figure out what works. Once we are happy with a circuit we can make a permanent version on something like strip-board.
Breadboards have blue and red lines across the top and bottom. A wire strip runs across the board under each line. If we connect a power source to any point on the lines, all of the points (holes) on the line receive the power.
The middle area of the board has wire strips running vertically. A wire strip runs down the board under each line of holes. If we connect a power source to any point on the lines, all of the points (holes) above or below receive power.
The first circuit was one to power a single LED:
We used the Arduino here as a simple 5V battery. Current flows from the 5V pin on the Arduino, through the resistor, then the LED, and on to the GND pin on the Arduino. We should always used a resistor with an LED to protect it. It doesn’t take much current to damage an LED.
This has the LED on permanently – not very exciting, but good to get started with. It’s a good idea to start with a minimal circuit and build up to the more complicated circuit we actually want. That way, we can test and verify as we go, so that we don’t have too much testing and backtracking to do if something goes wrong.
It took a while to get everyone’s circuit working. Some of the LEDs had legs that were the same length, and there was no obvious way to see which one was the anode or cathode, so we had to guess and test.
Some of the resistors we took at random from the box were too high: 200 kΩ, for example, so the LEDs wouldn’t light up. We found some 220 Ω (red-red-brown) and 330Ω (orange-orange-brown) resistors to get us going.
Some of the LEDs were very dim. 180 Ω resistors (brown-grey-brown) helped there.
We did a quick calculation to see what value of resistor we really needed:
According to the spec sheet, our LEDs had a forward voltage of 2.2 V and a forward current of 20 mA. In other words, the voltage drop across the LED is 2.2 V, and they can draw up to 0.02 A without burning out.
If our supply is 5 V, then the voltage across the resistor is 5 – 2.2 = 2.8 V. This is Kirchoff’s Voltage Law.
Applying Ohm’s Law (V = RI), 2.8 = R*0.02, so R = 2.8/0.02 = 140 Ω.
A 140 Ω resistor will make our LED as bright as possible. Less than that will burn out the LED. More than that will produce a dimmer light. So, 180, 220, and 330 Ω are all fine.
Different LEDs have different forward voltages and currents, so it’s important to keep and consult the specification sheets before using them.
The next step in our circuit building was to connect the Arduino’s ground pin to the ground rail on the breadboard. Then we connected the negative (cathode) pin of the LED to the ground rail. This is an important step in circuit building: using a common ground for all our circuits on one board. It allows us to only have one wire running back to the Arduino ground, instead of one for each circuit. We would run out of space on the Arduino very quickly otherwise.
Next we did the same on the positive side. This isn’t necessarily as useful as the common ground as we’ll see later.
Once we were happy that we all had a working circuit, we moved on to use the Arduino to control the LED.
We did this by taking the wire that went to the 5V pin on the Arduino and plugging it into digital pin 12 instead. We went back to our Arduino sketches and defined a new integer variable, ledPin, and gave it a value of 12 to match where we plugged it in.
Then we changed every occurrence of LED_BUILTIN in our sketches from last week to ledPin instead. The Find (Replace with) function on the Edit menu of the IDE was helpful here.
Once we compiled the sketch and uploaded it to the Arduino, we had the LED on
the breadboard blinking our messages, just like the internal LED was last week.
Next, we added a second LED and resistor to the board, and wired it up the same as the first. The positive side of the resistor was connected to the positive power rail, and from there on to the Arduino. Now both LEDs blinked together.
To get them to blink separately, we took the wire from our second LED going to the positive rail and plugged it into digital pin 8 on the Arduino.
Then we created a new variable in our sketch, led2Pin, with a value of 8.
We added setup code for pin 8. Finally, we added two more lines to the loop, to have the output to LED 2 go low after LED 1 was set high, and vice versa.
The outcome was LED 2 was on when LED 1 was off and LED 2 was off when LED 1 was on.
Some demonstration code is shown below.
// Blink 2 LEDs: one on, one off
// Demonstration for CoderDojo Athenry
int led1Pin = 12;
int led2Pin = 8;
int one_second = 1000; // delay() function expects milliseconds
void setup() {
pinMode(led1Pin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led1Pin, OUTPUT);
}
void loop() {
digitalWrite(led1Pin, HIGH); // on
digitalWrite(led2Pin, LOW);
delay(one_second);
digitalWrite(led1Pin, LOW); // off
digitalWrite(led2Pin, HIGH);
delay(one_second);
}
CoderDojo Athenry 