Just back from 2 days with Artificialtourism getting some hands on experience with Arduino. After a morning of intros to Arduino, basic does and don’ts and looking at sensors available we got onto building some prototypes. First up was using a tri colour LED (see Farnell) with a simple cross fade app (from examples in Arduino).

This was then extended to add a serial read from a processing app that defined the RGB value to be used for the LED. The processing app uses an image of a colour wheel and the mousePressed event to get the pixel RGB value and then writes that to the appropriate serial port. Arduino is watching the same port and when it receives data it buffers the RGB values reading them separately into a function that sets the RGB level of the LED using PWM input to the Arduino circuit.

The other *nice* sensor we used was the parallax ultra-sounder…