Robots and Physical Computing

I have recently been playing with Edublocks ( edublocks.org ) and the 4tronix's Microbit Playground (the appropriately named Super Kit)  controlling programmable pixels/neopixels   and a servo . Recently a beta version of the Edublocks (see above) has become available ( https://app.edublocks.org/ ) so I wanted to play with it a bit and, at the same time, combine control the servo motor and neopixels together via a potentiometer (see below). The block version of the code is shown below: The python version np = None port1 = None pot2 = None port3 = None from microbit import * import neopixel np = neopixel.NeoPixel(pin0, 8) pin2.set_analog_period(20)# your own code while True:   port1 = pin1.read_analog()   pot2 = port1//128   port3 = port1//8   np[pot2] = (255, 0, 128)   np.show()   pin2.write_analog(port3)   sleep(250)   np.clear() To see it action via GIPHY A few thoughts on the be...

Using the brilliant Edublocks specifically to microbit ( https://microbit.edublocks.org/  ) I have been playing with a  4tronix Microbit playground . Previously I played with getting the turning a potentiometer to selected which neopixel light up , in this post the potentiometer is used to control the direction of the servo motor. Below is the block code in Edublocks used to do this. Set up use the Potentiometer attached to Pin1 to control the direction of a servo motor on pin2.  The potentiometer output is turned into values between 0 (or 5 when I checked) and 1023; it is then divided, using the Floor operation (//, returns the integer part of a division), by 8 to decrease the sensitivity of turning the potentiometer. These values allow both clockwise and anticlockwise turning of the servo to based on the full range of the potentiometer. The line pin2.set_analog_period(20) was based on experimentation in a previous post . The text-based version...

Using the brilliant Edublocks specifically to microbit ( https://microbit.edublocks.org/  ) I have been playing with a 4tronix Microbit playground .  Set up use the Potentiometer attached to Pin1 to select which of eight neopixels is turned on. The potentiometer output is turned into values between 0 (or 5 when I checked) and 1023; it is then divided, using the Floor operation (//, returns the integer part of a division), by 128 to give a number between 0 and 7. This number is used to selected which pixel attached to pin 0 lights up. Each pixel is set to white. The text-based version of the python code is shown below np = None pot1 = None pot2 = None from microbit import * import neopixel np = neopixel.NeoPixel(pin0, 8) while True:   pot1 = pin1.read_analog()   pot2=pot1//128   np[pot2] = (32,32,32)   np.show()   sleep(50)   np.clear() via GIPHY It is going to be interesting to exp...