Africa Charity - Setting up a program with Arduinos

[cgozzard]

Hi All. I am a Physics teacher in Limpopo in South Africa and I work for the Charity Sumbandila Sumbandila.org.. Anyway, We have been donated 6 Arduinos and I am looking for small projects we could do with them. Any ideas? Chris

[JimboZA]

Hey Chris and welcome, from not far South of you.

Answer to your question depends on a few things I guess, not least is do you have some computing equipment to hook them up to? Assuming you do, what level are the kids at already, and what odds and ends did you get with the Arduinos and / or have already.... LEDs, dc motors, servos... any mechanical odds and ends?

There are loads of small things to get started with here, which might get you thinking about some things to do.

[cgozzard]

Thanks JimboZA.. We are going to have six different stations each with an arduino and a PC. The students are going to write the code for different projects. So far I have had the idea of getting the students to reprogram the blink program for some our lighthouses here in SA. I have ordered some thermistors and LDRs from RABTRON based in Veeriniging, so we can can build our own digital thermometers and a light sensor circuit. We have also had some 300 in 1 kits donated too so we have parts. I just need the ideas really. What have you been using arduino for? Best regards Chris

[JimboZA]

My daughter Morag was active a year ago Chris, she assembled some robot chassis and dabbled a bit, which is really all I've been doing too. Messing around with the fundamantals, really....

But she's in Grade11 now and pushing hard for a good matric next year, so the Arduino hobby has taken a back seat to normal school classes as well as AP Maths and English. She's doing art too, which is inordinately heavy on time...

Are there many lighthouses in Limpopo? 

[cgozzard]

Haha!! Not too many Lighthouses to be honest!! Well, if you think of anything else let me know!! Chris

[robtillaart]

manual from earthshine electronics

- https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw_ruMOtRDDgNXI3OTFGZXhIZ2c/edit?pli=1 -?

[cgozzard]

Fantastic! Many thanks Rob! Chris

[DamonHD]

A mad idea for you to dismiss: I'm intending to try to detect room occupancy from FFT (Fourier) analysis of voice from a small microphone using one of the free Arduino/AVR FFT libraries knocking around.  I haven't done it yet myself.

It might be quite impressive for the students to control their Arduinos by voice or handclap or foot-stomping one way or another.

Rgds

Damon