First Post

I'll use this to keep track of the things I'm working on. I just bought an arduino after thinking about it for years, and right before I'm supposed to graduate. I probably won't get much homework done for the last couple weeks of the quarter. Anyway, I'm still at school and don't have many electronic components. Here's my first project.

A blinking LED to simulate a heartbeat. All I needed was a resistor and an LED. Here's what it looks like in operation. It's kind of hard to see in the video, so try it yourself if you can

Here's the code. If you know which COMS port your arduino is on, and you have the codebender plugin installed, you should be able to load it directly onto your arduino from this page.


Some interesting things to note are that the LED's brightness is very nonlinear with pwm value. Changes on the low end of the scale have a much larger effect than changes on the high end. The difference between 5 and 6 (out of 255) is much larger than the difference between 200 and 255, at least to our eyes. Also, to make the pulsing look like something living, it has to be pretty different from an actual heartbeat. Much slower, and smoothed out. It just doesn't seem right otherwise.