“The 2023 Winter Break Practice Together” event has successfully concluded! This winter break practice event offered five platforms to choose from, especially popular platforms, and due to limited numbers, those who are slow will miss out. Next time the event starts, be quick to get in, don’t hesitate too much.
This winter break practice had a higher completion rate than previous sessions, and the Electronic Forest collected many excellent projects. It is evident that students have steadily improved their skills through multiple participations in the activities and can independently complete projects with increasing creativity. (👏👏👏 Thanks to everyone for their active participation, creating so many excellent projects for the Hard River!)
The Raspberry Pi Pico platform had many project options this winter break practice, and they were relatively simple. Most participating students completed the projects, and I believe they have already received the review results. Next, we will select some distinctive projects to share for everyone to learn together.
Today, I want to introduce the reaction tester project made with the Raspberry Pi STEP Pico platform. The specific requirement of this project is to randomly light up an LED on the board, press a button on the board, and display the time from the light turning on to the button press on the screen.
We have selected four outstanding projects to share with everyone. Although they are the same topic, different people will have different design ideas, so let’s take a look!
This project uses two onboard buttons as input devices, 12 LEDs as operation indicators, and an OLED for auxiliary display. It generates a random number of LED positions and waiting times using Python’s built-in random number generation function. It uses a timer to record the accumulated value when the randomly generated light turns on, and after pressing K1, it waits for 3 seconds to start randomly flashing any of the 12 LEDs, with a time between 0.5s-0.7s. After a maximum of 4 wrong lights, the required LED lights up, and the timer starts counting. After pressing K2, it retrieves the second accumulated value in the interrupt function and disables the timer. The time difference is displayed on the OLED screen. It also manually searches for the Chinese character library to achieve Chinese display on the OLED screen and adds an anti-sabotage feature.
(For specific project details, see: eetree.cn/project/detail/1686)
The highlight of this project is the clear user operation guidance displayed on the OLED screen for the user being tested, and it also includes an anti-error feature. When the user operates too frequently or makes a mistake, the OLED screen will display “Error!” to remind the user to operate correctly.
(For specific project details, see: eetree.cn/project/detail/1650)
Project demonstration results
This project generates random numbers through software. After the program starts, it lights up the LED on the board under the control of random numbers. After the tester presses the button, the processor calculates the time difference from the light turning on to receiving the button press and displays the time difference on the PC via USB, while also showing the time information on the OLED. An anti-cheating feature is also added to prevent users from frantically rushing to answer in order to achieve faster response speed.
(For specific project details, see: eetree.cn/project/detail/1583)
Project design block diagram
This project not only meets the design requirements of the reaction tester but also adds a light show and music playback function. The final presentation of the project is very cool. Below is the design idea of the project implementation.
The main idea for detecting reaction time is to generate random numbers through software. After the program starts, it lights up the first RGB light on the board under the control of random numbers. After the tester presses the button, the processor calculates the time difference from the light turning on to receiving the button press and displays the time difference on the PC and OLED via USB.
The colorful light show is mainly implemented by first searching for the RGB light’s different color codes online, displaying the corresponding codes, selecting the favorite color to light up four in a loop to achieve a cool flowing light of different colors, and selecting the favorite color lights from 1-12 to loop and reduce the delay time to observe another cool light show. After the light show ends, the white light turns on to play “Two Tigers”. This is mainly done by changing the output PWM to make the buzzer emit different sounds, finally converting the melody of “Two Tigers” to the corresponding PWM.
(For specific project details, see: eetree.cn/project/detail/1545)
Many students reported that using the STEP Pico platform for the first time with Thonny tool and MicroPython programming, they could complete these projects in a month and smoothly resolve small issues encountered during the design. Students are truly excellent!
Next, we need to continue to study in depth and become more proficient in using RP2040. Remember to click “Read Original” to see more excellent projects.
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