Category: The Amazing Pushbutton (With Processing)

As in all Maker projects, a bug can occasionally creep in. Processing is an awesome software package for developing cool Arduino microcontroller projects, but it can be challenging to use. Here are a few troubleshooting tips for the most common problems that can occur: Following these three guidelines should minimize your frustration when it comes…

The characters “L” and “H” are an interesting way to represent the information you get when the pushbutton turns on and off. But if we really want to see the “magic” of the pushbutton, we’ll need to use a graphical software language called Processing. Processing software allows digital information (actually, just about any kind of information)…

Before building this awesome visual Arduino Microcontroller project, you have to install the Processing programming language on your computer. Here are the installation instructions: After installing the Processing programming language onto your computer, you’re now ready to build the visualization software for the Amazing Pushbutton device!

With the Amazing Pushbutton built, it’s time to upload the sketch. Example 17-1 sends digital information to the Arduino IDE (integrated development environment) Serial Monitor and turns the onboard LED on and off with each press of the pushbutton switch. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow: Example 17-1. The Amazing Pushbutton sketch Once the Amazing Pushbutton sketch has…

Building the Amazing Pushbutton requires the use of a USB cable to send digital information from the Arduino to a computer screen. As shown in Figure 17-1, the device is quite simple to build, using only a 1KΩ fixed resistor and a pushbutton switch. The two components are connected in series. Where the two electronic components tie together,…

Figure 17-1. The Amazing Pushbutton

With this project, you can make colorful lines and numbers move up and down your computer screen as you press a simple pushbutton switch. To do that, this project will introduce you to Processing, a simple, easy-to-learn programming language (very much like the Arduino language) that makes it very easy to display graphics on a computer screen. When…