Skip to main content

TinkerCad microbit traffic light simulator (now with video)

Back to playing with TinkerCad in a previous post called explaining-tinkercad-microbit-neural, I used it to produce a simulation of a microbit-based neural network built around microbits. 

If you haven't played with this free tool to TinkerCad https://www.tinkercad.com/dashboard from AutoCad, I highly recommend it as a versatile, simple CAD system (that includes coding for microbits) with a load of support material. If that wasn't enough, it is free and online.

So, to experiment, I have made a simple traffic light simulator (an oldie but a goodie), so I can see what it can do a little more. Essentially, Red, Orange and Green LEDs (with appropriate resistors) are controlled by pins 0,1,and 2 on the microbit.


So here is a circuit with a microbit. The anode (the one with the bent leg)connects to the microbit pins through resistors. The cathode goes to the ground connection.





Here is the code for the microbit turning the LEDs on and off, and when it starts up putting a smiley face onto the microbit.









For those who like circuit diagrams, it can produce a more formal circuit diagram and the parts list (see below)- nice feature.









Have a play with the simulator below it goes a little bit further and changes the smiley face to letters (see the code below)



Possible ideas, change the LEDs to those that change colour, and now the approach can be used to provide a bit of control on the timings of those. Also experimented with replacing the smiley face with letters for LEDs colour (e,g, R for Red) - actually done that in the simulation above with the code below :-)





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 ...

Escape the Maze with a VR robot - Vex VR

You don't need to buy a robot to get programming a robot, now there are a range of free and relatively simple to start with robot simulators to play with. Three examples are listed below: - Make code for Lego EV3  https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/05/programming-robots-virtually-3-lego-ev3.html   - i Robot simulator  https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/04/programming-robots-virtually-2-irobot.html - Vex robotics Vexcode VR   https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/04/programming-robots-virtually-1-vexcode.html   It is the last one of these ( https://www.vexrobotics.com/vexcode-vr ) that is the focus of this post and return to hit, after an earlier discussion in  https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/04/programming-robots-virtually-1-vexcode.html   .  Two of the nice things about the package, apart from being free, are it uses a Scratch-like programming language and it provides a ...