The week before last, we had our first Arduino day. This involved some scripting when we wrote the code for the microcontroller, but our focus was on the electronic circuitry aspect.

This last week, we met up and took a closer look at programming. The ultimate goal is to translate text from a computer into Morse code, and have the microcontroller blink or buzz the message, like a telegraph. Along the way, we looked at concepts like string and dictionary data types, mutability, and serial communications.

When we were done for the day, our code seemed to be translating correctly, and even had case insensitivity built in:

$ python textToMorse.py
–>sOS
…/—/…/

It’s not done yet. You can watch its progress (and check out our other projects as they crop up) on our new GitHub Repository

Our next meeting is scheduled for Saturday, 11 July, from 3-5 PM at Internationalist Books. Check us out!