Creative Commons Calculator

Hi all,

at the moment I’m preparing a presentation stand about Open Educational Resources for an education fair this weekend. The goal is to inform people about the benefits of publishing their teaching materials free and under open licenses. I thought about ways to make the stand a little bit more interactive and had the idea to add something like a Creative Commons calculator for teachers to play around with, whenever the stand is unsupervised for a few minutes.

I would like to connect a few buttons (two pins) and an LCD (2X16) to an Arduino Uno R3. Five buttons for the CC-Elements “Zero”, “BY”, “SA”, “NC” and “ND” and one button to reset the text on the LCD. As default the abbreviation CC should be displayed in the first row of the LCD. Whenever you hit one of the buttons, an element like BY or NC gets added to the License. If it is a valid License, it says “Valid License” in the second row of the LCD, when you typed in elements that don’t mix, like CC Zero-SA-ND, it says “This is not a valid license.” The reset button obviously resets everything that was typed in and the default CC appears in the first line.
This is my first project with an Arduino and to be honest, I’m generally not too savvy when it comes to working with electronics and programming. I always wanted to start learning about it though, so I thought, this might be a good project to get started. I bought all components and tried getting it to work, but I guess I underestimated the complexity of the project for a complete beginner.

I’ll attach a screenshot of the circuit diagram. At the moment I’m pretty undecided, if it will work or just explode in a big ball of fire. :wink:

When it comes to code, I don't even know where to start, yet… :frowning:

Would you please help me with this project? I would extremely appreciate it. Until then I’ll keep my fire extinguisher ready… :slight_smile:

Thank you very much!

Tim

When it comes to code, I don't even know where to start, yet…

You should start by using switches, not buttons. Buttons go on shirts. Switches go in electronic projects.

All I see for your circuit diagram is a big white space. I'm guessing you hosted the picture on a site my company does not like.

The distributors refer to "pushbutton switch", I could see 'button' as a less technical shorthand for that.

There are many libraries for displaying stuff on an LCD screen, hard to refere you to one without have more screen details.

As for reading the 'button', that's pretty easy, just use digitalRead, there are examples in the IDE for that.

Hi Paul,

thanks for pointing that out. I'm not a native speaker and my English has become a bit rusty, I'm afraid - still need to learn the right technical terms, when it comes to electronics. :slight_smile:

I'm sorry the embedding of the picture didn't work. Here's a link: Seafile-Server der Universitäten und Hochschulen in Rheinland-Pfalz

Thanks again for your help and have a great day

Tim

CrossRoads:
There are many libraries for displaying stuff on an LCD screen, hard to refere you to one without have more screen details.

As for reading the 'button', that's pretty easy, just use digitalRead, there are examples in the IDE for that.

Thanks for your reply, CrossRoads,

What kind of screen details do you need? I've been tinkering with the LCM1602A-Display from Longtech.

I didn't know that there are many libraries for LCD screens, I only found the LiquidCrystal Library so far. Can I add more libraries somehow?

My questions are probably peanuts for you guys, sorry. :slight_smile: Tonight I'll dig into a few more tutorials and try to get results.