Arduino 101- Crash Course w/ Mark Rober

welcome back to Crunch Labs I'm Mark Rober and today we're doing just like a quick crash course on arduinos so let's start with the basics this is an Arduino you might have seen it in some Electronics builds in fact you might have seen it on a lot of Builds on my channel I use these all the time to get revenge on Halloween candy thieves that's something you can do you can go to the arcade and suddenly dominate a bunch of the games like this you can build shark Bing devices squirrel baiting devices and even porch pirate baiting devices you can make automatic Strike bowling balls or automatic Bullseye dart boards even if it's just for something simple like a candy dispenser when Mr Beast tricks you to go on vacation with him to an abandon City so it's some kind of complicated looking Electronics board but what exactly is it so a good analogy is looking at us humans for starters I need energy so I eat food and then with that energy I can power my eyes and ears and I get information from the world around me then I take that information and then that goes to my brain then my brain processes that and then it tells my muscles to do something for example ah that light is kind of bright I'm going to raise my arm to sort of block it from hitting my eyes now just like that with these components you see in front of me first of all there's a battery pack that powers this whole system so that's like me eating things to have energy right here we have a sensor in this case it picks up IR signals this is like our ears and eyes we call this an input so it takes that information sends it right here to the brain that Arduino microcontroller it does some thinking and then it sends information down these wires to these Servo Motors these are the outputs or the affectors and sure enough if we test this out I'm going to send a signal to the input you can see the Arduino thinking about here as it lights up and then it tells the muscles to do something in this case for this YW motor to spin around now I'm going to be honest this is kind of boring an electronic system just like this just isn't that interesting but if you combine it with some mechanical pieces that could kind of move place in some interesting spots well now you suddenly have a super cool desktop turret and you can see it's this exact system just applied here there's three Servo Motors here here and here we've got our brain right here and our battery pack right here and now I can spin this all around I can go down and up just by controlling the different Servo Motors and of course I could fire my darts rapid fire heck yeah and just to ease your mind out of the gate if you can put together a Lego build you can program with an Arduino so my goal today is just to break it down to First principles and make it really straightforward because the trick is you don't need to know how to code to program and build cool stuff with an Arduino there's just so many resources out there there's tons of code that already exists for almost anything you can imagine that you can just copy and paste with minor tweaks even if that on top of that there's a lot of AI chat Bots that can actually help you program help you think about your code and help you actually write the code in debug it so it's totally fine if you've never taken any kind of coding class this can still make perfect sense and so after watching this video and doing a few hack packs now when you see something like the glitter balm and at first you might think this is indistinguishable for magic like how does it know when you lift the lid to wait a few seconds to spin the cup to fire the fart spray to tell the phones to record but then when you see this you're like aha there's the brain so just like in our simple example there's inputs that tell it hey the lid has been lifted the brain takes that information and then it says information to the outputs I.E spinning a pound of the world's finest glitter and firing an uncharitable amount of fart spray to fill your whole apartment hello keep the change you filthy animal operation whoever smelt it delted initiated operation butt trumpet initiated oh you all right all right we all right all right weing get it okay smells like in here so let's briefly start right at the beginning and just say what is even electricity well electricity is really just moving electrons so I have some delicious lemon electrons right here now if these electrons were just chilling like this that's not electricity but as soon as they all start moving now we've got electricity so now if you had more of these lined up and they were moving faster that's more electricity it would be more powerful but at the end of the day your phone your computer your glitter bomb the blood that's running through those veins of all those pieces of Hardware is just moving electrons and the difference between having a motor spin that sprays out glitter or having your phone have a screen that just lights up is how you decide to sort of divide and send those electrons throughout that mechanical build now let's talk about the electrical circuit now you can think about the electrical circuit sort of like a Hot Wheels track for these electrons to travel on so if I connect this wire here you'll notice this light bulb lights up again instant replay no light soon as I connect it light well why is that well you've made a full electric circuit so these electrons could flow from the positive terminal of this battery through this wire at the speed of light through the outside casing on the light bulb up through the bright little spot down and then back to the negative terminal and as the electrons pass over this spot there's a resistance built up there and it gives off light so all the electrons that have been stored up on this side of the battery just coming out this wire just flowing around through the light bulb and then there're stockpiling on the negative side of the battery now eventually if we let this go for long enough all the electrons will be from this side over this side and we call that a dead battery now a cool addition we could put into this electronic circuit is a switch so if I just disconnect this and I'm basically extending my hot Wheels track here wait a sec the light doesn't come on well that's because this switch is in the off position it's like a gate that's stopping the electrons so they can't move and if they're not moving guess what no electricity but as soon as we flip that on now the electrons can move again and that's electricity which is why our light bulb is now once again turning on all right well now let's talk about how arduinos harness moving electrons or electricity but not before I eat one more delicious elron so what we've got here is an Arduino build now again you might be looking and be like Ah that's kind of complicated but what this is is it's a nightlight when the lights go off and you cover this the LED light it gets brighter so this is effectively exactly how a nightlight works in your house so when it's dark you turn the lights off this little light sensor senses that and turns the light to get brighter now just like before all that's happening here is moving electrons except we've added this Arduino so we've made the electronic circuit a little bit smarter so the electrons come from the positive terminal of this battery and one Hot Wheels track is over here where it's just continuously checking this sensor and saying is it dark or is it bright and then there's a second Hot Wheels track here and if the brain senses that it's dark it's like yo we need to increase the amount of little yellow Skittles of electrons on this Hot Wheels track so that this light will get brighter so this is an example just a really simple thing that you could build using arduinos and we're going to get to a bunch more really fun ones in a second but first let's review the four parts you need for any Arduino build so the four parts to any Arduino build or really like any robot or any piece of electronic equipment you interact with like your washing machine or a calculator or your phone is you have your inputs then you have the brain itself that does the Computing and the outputs so that's three and the fourth of course is just the wires that connect those three and then again going back to the human analogy these inputs the sensors this is your eyes and ears the Arduino or the computer that's your brain then the outputs or the affectors those are your muscles and of course the wires are the nervous system so your eyes and ears send the information across the nervous system to your brain and the Brain decides what to do with it and sends that information through the nervous system to your muscles that then affect the world these are the affectors the outputs so let's look at some of the sensors some of the inputs the eyes and ears well the first one is this light sensor that's just what we saw in the NightLight example right so you get in information on the light around you goes to the brain the brain's like hey it suddenly got dark goes to an output well one of the outputs are LEDs so it would say make this brighter or make it dimmer let's look at some other inputs this is just a simple button this is a microphone so literally it's like an ear this right here is really cool it's a proximity sensor so it's sensing if something's close or far away this is just a knob this is a joystick this is a soil moisture sensor now we go to the brain and now let's skip to some of the outputs this is called a Servo motor these are the same type of Motors that were on our turret at the beginning of the video this is just a little DC motor in this case it's got a little fan on the end here's some LEDs and then here's a little buzzer speaker and by the way if you go online there is a ton of relatively inexpensive options where you justed a kit that has a bunch of these inputs or sensors and then also a bunch of these outputs or the affectors and this is where it gets really fun because how can we creatively combine these inputs to do cool stuff with these outputs well here's some examples you could maybe stick this soil moisture sensor in your plant and then when the soil gets dry you could have it light up an LED so you know it's dry or even better have it send a file that says I'm thirsty feed me water or maybe you could use this microphone and you could have a box a locked box and it's locked with this output with this Servo motor and the only way to open that box is if you give a secret knock in just the the right order and when it hears that very specific knock on the microphone at just the right spacing well then the brain gets that information and says that's it and then it turns the super motor that then opens the door and allows you to get your secret stash what's inside I don't know maybe some delicious yellow electrons you can use this knob here to increase the speed of a fan that's on you or maybe you use a thermometer to even turn the fan on at the right temperature so you don't even have to turn it kn you could have a cookie jar and when the lid is lifted this button gets unpressed and when that happens you have an alarm goes off because someone's invaded your secret stash of cookies and so now you can get a sense that for a lot of these it's just kind of like the story you package around the hardware you can even do something really simple with like this proximity sensor and this lights and buzzer and then a secret button and you could call it a cool guy finder so you go up to one of your buddies and the buzzer goes off and it lights up he must be a cool guy then you secretly release the button that breaks the circuit and you go up to another buddy and it doesn't light up kind of a ridiculous concept but you can see all the fun you can have with something like this if you just package the right story around it and that's really what's going on with my videos that have these electronic builds in them they're usually not that complicated it's really about the story you package around it to have this really creative fun engineering build that can either just be really useful in your life or it could just be fun and bring joy to your friends and family family all right so now that we've got a prettyy good overview of what you can do with arduinos and microcontrollers I just want to go one level deeper really briefly to talk about how you actually put new code onto this thing or swap out the brain so now it knows when it gets some information from a soil moisture sensor what to do with that information cuz that's a different brain than the one that looks for a specific set of knock knocks before opening the box right for each one of those you just swap out the brain so it knows what this input is and then what to do with it and before we do that I do want to briefly mention I'm saying Arduino and microcontroller sort of interchangeably Arduino is name of the company they're open source they're super super cool they basically got this whole movement started and so massive props to them there's different types of board this is the Arduino Uno it's very common the nice part about this is you've got these header pins so your wires can just plug like directly into the board which is pretty convenient now in the case of hackpack technically this isn't an Arduino because because we made our own version so it's just a microcontroller so like an Arduino is a specific brand of microcontroller in the same way that Tesla is a specific brand of car so let's just take a quick look about what the software looks like and how you actually do the brain swapping so the first thing you've got to do is just go to arduino.cc and you're going to download a specific piece of software called Arduino IDE it's free and then when you download the program and open it up you get a screen like this so all you got to do is plug in your Arduino select your correct port and now you've got a connection to the brain so each version of a brain is called a sketch so this is called an Arduino sketch again you do not need to learn to code you just need to be good at copying and pasting because there's so much on the internet as far as like what kind of code this is the code in these sketches is a slightly modified version of C++ it's just an incredibly common language that is used a lot especially anytime you're interacting with Hardware so when you look at the code you'll see there's kind of two chunks the first is the setup and ultimately all you need to know here is setup only happens once that's where you're kind of establishing the rules of the game and then Loop is the thing that just runs over and over and over like with the NightLight we set that up runs right when you turn it on after that it's just continuously running a loop over and over and over just continuously asking what is the value of that light and if at any point it gets too dark then in that Loop it has a little spot that says Ah then turn on the LED and then it keeps checking is it still dark is it still dark as soon as it gets light okay now turn off the light and if you want your mind blown by just how powerful even a small computer like this can be it runs that Loop 4 million times in 1 second so let's just run a simple program and see how this works so I can go up here to file examples and then Basics and I'm going to choose blink and when I do this you'll see it preloads a sketch so again here's the setup where it's calling out what pins and stuff we're using using and then here's the loop that just Loops over and over and what you should know is that anything that's like in this grayed out color that's in between these forward slash and the asteris that's just what we called a comment it does nothing it's like it's not even there it's just as humans it helps us read it so there's a link to where you could learn more it says who modified and created this but anything not in Gray like the setup here or the actual information on the loop that's what the board is actually using so I'm going to go ahead and hit this over Arrow which will upload the code to my Arduino know effectively swapping out the brain on this thing and lo and behold we now see the onboard LED is blinking now here's what's really cool and I remember the first time I did this it was just like this aha moment that felt really powerful but I can change the rate at which it blinks so I'm going to check into the code here and sure enough it says it turns the LED on and then it waits for a second that's this delay and then it turns the LED off by making the voltage low and then it waits for a second so you can see the number here is in milliseconds so I'm going to get crazy and let's say I want it to stay off for 3 seconds so I'm going to change that to a 3,000 and then I want it to stay on for 4 seconds so I'm going to change that to 4,000 now I'm just going to upload that code swap out that new brain for this it's only slightly modified and now when we look at this led wouldn't you know it it's turning off for 3 seconds then staying on for four and when you do that for the first time it's just this powerful moment that like you controlled this piece of very complicated Hardware to do something you wanted this is a great first step and now just to be fun I'm going to change this to go even faster so I'm deleting a zero off of both of those and now when I upload we should see that it's blinking way faster so that's just about the most simple example of how you can swap out the brain on this thing but there's tons more examples online where you'll not only get the code but they'll also give you the schematic or basically how you would wire up and connect your inputs and outputs so as an example of one of those just going to go ahead and pull up this one I found where you use a knob to control a motor so here's a program I Googled called knob and it tells you at the top what it does it says it controls the position of a servo motor with a knob basically and I'll just cut to the Chase and show you that so you see as I turn this knob the motor itself turns so the question is a what kind of creative story could you put on this to make it interesting and I'm just thinking oh you could have this in your car at your dashboard and maybe at your back window you've just got like a funny picture and maybe the arm you Pace to this thing so if you want to wave to someone cuz they were nice and they let you in you can just spin the knob like this and now you're waving to the car behind you or I don't know maybe you're in an abandoned city with Mr Beast and you want to scare him by turning a knob to have a Servo arm push a glass bottle off the top story so he thinks scary people are out to get us I'm just saying hypothetically that's something something you could do or maybe in bed if you want to turn off your lights remotely you just turn this knob and then it flicks the switch down infinite options of how you take this hardware setup and apply it creatively to the world around you at any rate as we scroll down on this page you'll see it shows you exactly how to set this up where to plug each of the colored wires into we call this a schematic and then it gives you the code so you literally just copy and paste this into your own code then hit upload and now you're totally golden now one thing I'll point out is I've got this white thing here we called that a solderless breadboard and that's because I could technically solder all these wires together to make that Hot Wheel track right to make the electronic circuit the cool thing about these breadboards is if you flip it over you'll see these are all connected so if you plug in something here that means if I plug in anything along this row because those are all connected with this little piece of metal it's no different if both of these wires were physically touching each other and the same also goes for all of these rows because you can see those are also horizontally connected as you go down the breadboard so plugging in this wire here and this wire here is the same as connecting them and it just makes it super convenient for sort of prototyping and testing and then once you have it and you like it and you want to lock it down let's say you want to go to mass production or let's say you want to make 20 glitter bombs you could send all across the country then you do what's called a custom printed circuit board and that's basically where you take the breadboard and the sardu you package them all in one thing you get these custom made and this custom PCB is essentially this just in the printed form even the battery holster you can see is just part of the board and so a custom PCB is what you'll find in your calculator in your microwave in your washing machine in your car basically anything electronic that you interact with will have a custom PCB just for that piece of hardware and it's no different than a breadboard and an arduin know just packaged into one clean thing that you could Mass produce and so for the NightLight example I showed earlier I also just found that by Googling it and using this website that also showed me exactly how to set it up with the breadboard and gave me the actual code to run and of course in addition to just Googling and finding pre-written codes you know chat GPT and other llm models are a game Cher so you can actually put your code into there if it's not compiling you could ask it questions on how to improve the code and simplify it if you have a really cool idea you want to try can literally have a conversation and have it be your tutor to help you get your code exactly what you want or maybe you've copy and pasted a few bits of code you're not sure why they aren't playing nicely together it can help you figure that stuff out now coming back full circle to where we started this video for hackpack which are these really fun robots that you can put together where the brain is a microcontroller which just makes this so fun is you could swap out that brain to completely upgrade the functionality that that's the secer sauce that's the magic but then with hackpack when you want to plug it into your computer to swap the brain instead of using the Arduino IDE that I showed earlier we have our own browser based coding console and when you're there you'll see there's three levels at level one the code is fully locked down and you can only swap out the full code for verified new hacks like the passcode hack at level two you can now change some key variables like how quickly the barrel turns or how many numbers to put in your passcode lock and then at level three you have full access to change everything so if you want to learn more about hackpack get that robot in a box coming right to your door where it's like that first step and getting you down the path creative engineering you just go to crunch labs.com but either way hopefully this was a useful crash course in how arduinos work I'm really stoked you're taking this step because I found so much joy from taking my mechanical engineering skills and sort of combining them with electronics and then wrapping it in a story to make really fun content for the world and even just for my family and friends so good luck and thanks for watching

Channel: CrunchLabs

Views: 458,669

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Id: yi29dbPnu28

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2024