In the past two weeks in the Hackers group at CoderDojo Athenry, we have started Python programming on the Raspberry Pi.

The Pi is about the same size as the Arduino that we used earlier, and the Pi Zero is about the size of the Arduino Nano, and both Pi and Arduino have input/output pins for physical computing. However, they have significant differences.

Unlike the Arduino which is a microcontroller (which means it is designed to run a single program that was uploaded onto it), the Raspberry Pi has a full computer operating system, so it is more like a PC to use. It can be programmed in many languages, but Python is a popular choice as it is clear to read and there are lots of libraries to make tasks easier. Because it’s a full computer, you can write and run your programs all on the Pi, without connecting it to a laptop.

The first step in programming is to figure out how to do loops, variables and decisions, as these are fundamental. Here is our first Python program to try out these:

# Python comments start with #

age = 14 # a variable holding an int
name = "Michael" # variable holding a string

# Output
print ("My name is", name, "and my age is ", age)

# Loop
for x in range (1, 5):
    print ("This is line ", x)

# Decision
if (age  17):
    print("Adult")
else:
    print("Teenager")

Next we moved on to using the GPIOZero libraries for controlling lights and buttons. We will continue to explore this in the coming weeks.

The documentation is here: https://gpiozero.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

This week in the Hackers group at CoderDojo Athenry, we built on last week’s work on blinky lights, in which we made a simple circuit involving LEDs and resistors connected to an Arduino, and wrote code to get the LEDs to blink.

An LED is an example of an output from our microcontroller. We would also like to have inputs. Examples of circuit inputs are:

• Switches
• Dials
• Sensors that measure something

We focused on dials, specifically a variable resistor or rheostat. This is the kind of knob or dial you find on dimmer switches, volume controls on old radios, electric guitars, and many others.

A variable resistor has 3 connectors: the two outer ones connect across a voltage source (e.g. 5V and ground pins on the Ardiuno) and the voltage at the middle pin can be adjusted from 0 to 5V by turning the knob.

We connected the middle pin of the variable resistor to Analog input 2 of the Arduino. The connections are shown above.

Then, the code to read its value is:

potValue = analogRead(potPin);

where potValue and potPin are ints that were defined already.

The value that you get is in the range 0-1024, and changes as you turn the dial.

Here is a full Arduino program to read a value and display it on the Serial Monitor window if you have a computer connected to your Arduino:

int potPin = 2;    // select the input pin for the potentiometer
int potValue = 0;  // value to read from potentiometer

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);  // need for print commands later
}

void loop() {
  potValue = analogRead(potPin);    // read the value from the sensor
  Serial.println(potValue);
}

In the group, we used this as the basis to improve last week’s program. This time, the speed at which the LED blinks is controlled by turning the potentiometer dial.

The previous code to control how long the LED blinks for was:

delay(one_second);

We changed this to:

delay(potValue);

Of course, we also had to add the code to read the potentiometer value at the top of the loop() function.