03) Breaking out on the breadboard

03) Breaking out on the breadboard

Now we are going to make an external LED blink

First setup your Thing:

  1. Turn your Thing to “off”
  2. Removing the USB cable from your laptop
  3. Attaching your Thing to a ‘breadboard’ with elastic bands to hold it a little steady.
  4. Wire: Connect ‘5V to ‘+’ (red cable), ‘GND’ to ‘-’ (blue cable)
  5. Wire: ‘Pin14’ to ‘h5’
  6. Resistor (150 OHM, green and brown): ‘g5’ to ‘g11’
  7. LED: long leg ‘f11’, short leg ‘f17’
  8. Wire: ‘g17’ to ‘-’ 

Look at the picture above to see if you have wired it correctly

  1. Save your Blink as a new file calling it LEDblink.
  2. Above the function void setup() you need to add the following line: ‘const int ledPin = 14;’
  3. Now change everytime the code says ‘LED_BUILTIN’ with ‘ledPin’
  4. This change the LED blinking from the internal LED on the board called 5 to instead sending the same signal to 14. Which should be connected via a resistor to your LED.
  5. Re-connect usb
  6. Turn on power on Thing
  7. Verify LEDblink
  8. Upload LEDblink to the Thing
  9. See it blinking!!! Yahh
  10. Try to change how it blink

NOTICE: the Thing is not designed to be used on a breadboard, which means that if something does not work, try pushing the wires or the Thing a little – making sure that wires attached to the Thing is touching the sides of the pin hole.

A method is a function which can take parameters and do something

blinking_LED (X, Y, Z) – where X = LedPin; Y = delay time; Z = numbers of times to blink