03.00 - Introduction

Overview

Sensing the environment allows organisms to make choices about how to obtain nutrients for energy. IF organisms can’t sens the environment at all, even at a micro chemical scale, then we don’t normally think of them as organisms, we call them rocks. The Arduino can be made to be somewhere between a rock and an organism. This is done by adding sensors to the Arduino that can receive data from the environment such as the light level, sound level, distance of an object, temperature, humidity, heartbeats and many more. The Arduino can be programmed to process this incoming data and then perform specific tasks based on the results. This creates a simple sensing robot.

Learning Objectives

• Use a microphone’s sound input to control an LED
• Use a ultrasonic sensor to detect distance
• use a photo resistor to measure light levels
• Use an unknown sensor in a demo application
• Modify parts of example code to fit your specific application
• Combine code from two separate examples into a single working sketch

Keywords

• Battery Power
• sensor
• microphone
• ultrasonic
• photo resistor
• amplifier