Blog - Sketching with Hardware

Day 2

After an interesting day with keyboard hacking and soldering basics the second day followed. We found us in this dusty and cramped space once again, where we tackled a new exciting topic. The almighty and blue Arduino Board! 

Bernhard, our awesome (but not blue) instructor showed us the power of this blue midget. All kinds of Arduinos were distributed among the students – ranging from Arduino Duemilanoves to Mega ADKs. To some beginners the (Mega) Arduino Boards might seem overwhelming with their huge number of pins at first. However, this misunderstanding was cleared quickly, after the difference between input and output pins, as well as, the difference between analog and digital signals were explained.

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The first day at this year’s Sketching with Hardware at the Media Informatics Lab of the LMU Munich.

The lucky students who happened to end up at the 2nd floor of the faculty’s building at Amalienstrasse had to overcome several obstacles first:

1st: Cruel darwinism took its toll. Unfortunately not everyone who applied got accepted (acceptance ratio of 1:3).

2nd: You have to pass the Chamber of Secrets while walking upstairs (there really is that mysterious door with exact that name tag on it) …

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Arduino Introduction

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Day 2 – Part 1
9 – 12 am

After getting started on day one with basic principles of electrical engineering, we got in touch with physical problems. Pure programming follows a clear logic. Building hardware requires knowledge about the interaction of several parts, which needs to be kept in mind while developing ideas.

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It is monday morning, 9:00 AM. We are 15 participants sitting in a room at the Amalienstraße, more or less awake but eagerly waiting for the workshop to begin.

First of all everyone gets a name tag and we are introduced to our tutors Bernhard and Patrick who will guide us through almost two of excitement and panic.
After a short general introduction it comes to the most sensitive part of the project which is choosing the right partner. We will work in teams of two. Awkward looks throughout the room, eye contacts and shy smiles are exchanged. Since nobody is really taking the initiative, out comes the bowl with little pieces of papers. They are drawn, Students of “Art & Multimedia” are paired with Students of “Media And Computer Engineering”. Now we have 7 teams, one consisting of three persons. Fortunately we did not need to find our partner with imitating animal voices (legend goes, previous courses had to do something quite embarrassing like that…)
And we start off with the theoretical part, learning about electricity, currents and breadboards.

We get a first look into our box, which is given to each group and consists of a soldering iron, some cables, a multimeter, a breadboard and some basic elements for soldering like cables, tin-solder, LEDs and of course one Arduino. But for now it remains untouched. Our first experiments contain a LED Lamp, a resistor and a 9 Volt battery. Easy stuff.

Some half hour later including some experiments with the on/off switch and a poti we have the first casualties (a red LED, may it rest in peace).
Next we learn some basics about soldering. Then we practise with whatever we want on a small circuit board. Then we read the Safety Instructions.

(Impressions Day 1: Bernhard and Patrick (check the name tags), soldering equipment, the insides of a keyboard, everyone to the toybox!, and some serious work)

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After having learnt the basics of electronics on the first day, it was time to get going and learn something about Arduino – the platform we are using to realize our projects. It’s an open source hardware platform which uses an Atmel AVR microcontroller and has several input and output pins to attach all different kinds of hardware. These can be sensors, LEDs, buttons, switches, servos and motors, everything we need for our projects.

Thus, day two was intended to give us a detailed introduction into Arduino, it’s IDE, wiring circuits and using all the electronic components. Here are some of the things we learned:

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