Skip to main content

Tinkercad and Microbit: To make a neuron

The free online CAD (and so much more) package Tinkercad https://www.tinkercad.com/ under circuits; now has microbits as part of the list of basic components available to build circuits out of.

To have a quick play I wonder if using the built in Scratch=like code blocks, I could build a simulation of neuron on the microbit.

Requirements 
- By altering the bias, weights change the behaviour of buttons A and B
-when A is pressed a variable input1 is set to 1 and when released it goes to 0. The same happens for Button B and a variable input 2
- if (bias+weight1*input1+weight2*input2)>=0 then a T for True appears of the LEDs otherwise F for False is shown.

That is it really, apart initialising the variables. The code for producing an OR is shown below and the GIF at the end shows an AND in action:





The GIF below shows it action for an AND (bias is set to -2); change the bias to -1 and you would get an OR.








All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robot Software

In the previous blog posts for this 'series' "It is a good time...."  Post 1  looked at the hardware unpinning some of this positive rise in robots; Post 2  looked at social robots; Post 3  looked at a collection of small robots; Post 4 looked at further examples of small robots Robots, such as the forthcoming Buddy and JIBO, will be based some established open sourceand other technologies. Jibo will be based around various technologies including Electron and JavaScript (for more details see:  http://blog.jibo.com/2015/07/29/jibo-making-development-readily-accessible-to-all-developers/ ). Buddy is expected to be developed around tools for Unity3d, Arduino and OpenCV, and support Python, C++, C#, Java and JavaScript (for more details see http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/customize_your_buddy_companion_robot_with_this_software_development_kit ).  This post contin ues with some of the software being used with the smaller robots.  A number ...

Speech Recognition in Scratch 3 - turning Hello into Bonjour!

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , that is a brilliant use of Scratch 3 - Speech Recognition to control a sprite in an alien language. Do the activity, and it is very much worth doing, and it will make sense! I  would also recommend going to the  machinelearningforkids.co.uk   site anyway it is full of exciting things to do (for example loads of activities  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/worksheets  ) . Scratch 3 has lots of extensions that are accessible through the Extension button in the Scratch 3 editor (see below) which add new fun new blocks to play with. The critical thing for this post is  Machine Learning for Kids  have created a Scratch 3 template with their own extensions for Scratch 3 within it  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/scratch3/ . One of which is a Speech to Text extension (see below). You must use this one ...

WebVR 3 Playtime: Augmented Reality

I am going to try to persuade you that using A-Frame it is not hard to do some simple Augmented Reality (AR) for free, via a browser, but that also can run on a mobile device. Introduction This is part of a short series of articles about some experiments with WebVR Web-based Virtual Reality - in this case based on the wonderful A-Frame  ( https://aframe.io )   .  In the first post  WebVR playtime 1: Basics of setting up, images and rotating blocks ,  I looked at setting up a scene and then rotating an object.  In the second pos t, recapped the basics, then look at adding video, 360 degree video, and models developed elsewhere. In this post we are going to start looking at using WebVR as part of an augmented reality solution. I going to start by building on the great resource Creating Augmented Reality with AR.js and A-Frame by Jerome Etienne, creator of AR.js - the starting code below and the basis of the solution ...