My internship in Berlin

Hello everyone, I’m Sartorato Nicolò, I’m eighteen and I Study electronics near Venice, in Italy. With the “Erasmus+” project I’ve been in Berlin for 35 days and I had the pleasure of working for 4 weeks at the Maker Store in Danziger Straße, the perfect place if you love electronic and robotics.

Nicolo

I liked so much to do my internship here, because I discovered a new way to study electronics, the Brick’s system by Brick’R’Knowledge, with which you can learn quickly while having fun.

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Personally, I mostly worked with the Arduino set, with whom I design a thermometer with a humidity sensor, for an OLED screen and also for a LED grid 16×16 (code below).

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I recommend everyone to try to use the system of bricks, I hope to return here one day in the future because it’s a very interesting place to make projects, study and to expand personal knowledge.

Here´s the video showing my circuit in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz5bsGzVQjk

See you at Maker Store 😉

Sartorato Nicolò

 

 

Code:

int temp=0;

int hum=0;

void setup(){

i2c_oled_initall(i2coledssd);

Wire.begin();

Serial.begin(9600);

Serial.println(« Temperature misuration »);

Serial.println();

Serial.println(« Type,\tstatus,\tHumidity (%),\tTemperature (C) »);

}

void loop(){

char buffer[30];

char buffe [20];

disp_buffer_clear(COLOR_BLACK);

disp_print_xy_lcd(0, 0, (unsigned char*) « DEGREES », COLOR_WHITE, 0);

disp_print_xy_lcd(0, 24, (unsigned char*) « HUMIDITY », COLOR_WHITE, 0);

disp_lcd_frombuffer();

int stat;

Serial.print(« DHT11, \t »);

stat = DHT.read(DHT11_PIN);

switch (stat){

case DHTLIB_OK:

Serial.print(« OK,\t »);

break;

case DHTLIB_ERROR_CHECKSUM:

Serial.print(« Checksum error,\t »);

break;

case DHTLIB_ERROR_TIMEOUT:

Serial.print(« Time out error,\t »);

break;

default:

Serial.print(« Unknown error,\t »);

break;

}

// DISPLAT DATA

Serial.print(DHT.humidity,1);

Serial.print(« ,\t »);

Serial.println(DHT.temperature,1);

temp = DHT.temperature ;

hum = DHT.humidity;

sprintf(buffer, « %4d Celsius », temp);

sprintf(buffe, « %4d / 100 », hum);

disp_print_xy_lcd(0, 11 ,(unsigned char*)buffer, COLOR_WHITE, 0);

disp_print_xy_lcd(0, 35 ,(unsigned char*)buffe, COLOR_WHITE, 0);

disp_lcd_frombuffer();

delay(4000);

}

 

Bricks at VFL arena

We were at the VFL arena in Wolfsburg last week – not to see a football game, though, but for a different exciting event: the KIDScraft 2.0 that took place for the second time.

Wolfsburg

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If you have fun, developing and programming your own robot or to experience how a whole room with all its interiors can be transferred into musical instruments. If you’ve always wanted to design and program your own computer game or to build a project with our bricks. Then KIDScraft 2.0 is the right event for you.

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150 students between 9 and 12 years participated in the camp and experimented, programmed and tinkered throughout the week. But there was also physical movement involved: the kids were part of all sorts of sportive activities and could even explore the Volkswagen plant.

There was a great closing event on Friday where families and friends could watch a video showing the kids at work during the week and in addition, the kids display their personal projects.

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We had fun and are looking forward to the next kids’ camp!

What can you expect from KIDScraft 2.0?

  • Experiment with or without computer
  • Realize your own ideas
  • Discover your own access to digitality
  • Learn the basics of coding and digital design
  • Experience an exciting framework programme

More information: www.kidscraft-camp.de

Photos: matthiasLeitzke

Workshop at Maker Store Berlin

A group of 25 people visited us in our Maker Store in Berlin last week to participate in one of our workshops. It started in the evening at 7 p.m. and right from the start, everybody was eager to build and program his or her own little robot. Therefore, building the robot wasn’t a problem at all for the participants and it did not take them more than an hour to finalize this first task.

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Then we opened the buffet for a short refreshment – with a special emphasis on “short” as the participants did not want to wait any longer but finally start with programming the robots. After an introduction into the world of programming robots, we gave them their first programming task: they were supposed to code their robots with “mBlock”, a programming language that is similar to Scratch and to teach the robot to follow a line.

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Our visitors were pretty smart and able to fulfill even this more advanced task rather easily. Although some participants did need some more time others (already advanced ones) supported them if they needed help – and that’s what a team event is all about, right!?

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At the end of the evening everybody was happy – us, as we had fun with such nice and sympathetic participants and the group because each one of them managed to build and program their own robot. Some of them already made friends with their robot and hence, saying goodbye was not as easy – which is why, on the next day, the group’s two organizers came back to our store to buy five robots for the team.

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If you feel like doing a team event that is different from the usual ones – contact us!

Electronics can be fun!?

Do you still have your doubts? Why don’t you participate in one of our summer workshops: we’ll start with a robotic workshop in our Berlin Maker Store on August, 8th.

M_Bot

Have you always wanted to build and program your own robot? Then this workshop is the right one for you: first you’ll assemble an “mBot” that you can assemble. Afterwards you’ll get an introduction into the Arduino based Scratch programming and you have the possibility to teach your robot all kinds of things – everything is possible.

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In our “Electronics for beginners” workshop for people from 10 years onwards, we would like to introduce you to the most important basics of electronics. You will learn what exactly an electronic circuit is, how a resistor functions in series and in parallel and what you can do with a transistor. Then you will build your own alarm system that you can take home after the workshop.
In the “Electronics for advanced” workshop you can deepen your knowledge regarding electronic engineering: You will get to know electrical condensers, inductors, relays, transistors and field-effect transistors. Additionally, you will build electronic circuits (with a timer 555), logic circuits, circuits with oscillators and/or amplifiers.

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In our “Arduino coding workshop” we introduce you to digital electronics and to coding of microcontrollers and the related necessary basics. We let it blink with LEDs and deal with analogue digital converters, I2C bus, keys and bounces, relays, rotation monitors and OLEDs.

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In addition, we offer a soldering workshop that is supposed to be for all people interested in soldering. First, you will get to know the necessary equipment, like soldering iron and tin solder and then you will become active: solder your own brick badges and take it home after the workshop.

Register now – there are only a few places still available!

 

3 weeks at the Maker Store

Praktikant

My name is Mattia, I’m seventeen and I study electronics in Italy. For my Erasmus and internship in Berlin I have been at the Maker Store in Danziger Straße. Here I had the opportunity to discover a completely new way to learn and experiment with electronics: the Brick’R’knowledge system. With that you can test a circuit simply by putting the right bricks together. It’s easy and super fast!

The Advanced set is a great way to try more complex circuits but I worked mainly with the Arduino coding set, which provides you everything to start creating with Arduino. With the coding set, I have built an electronic dice with a few bricks: the Arduino, a button, an OLED display and some wiring and power bricks.

Dice

The Arduino sketch is easy, too:
after having set all the OLED display libraries, a loop waits for the button to be pressed and then gets a random number from one to six, which is then displayed in the screen. It’s a very simple project, but it could be used to play instead of a real dice!

Watch the video here

To sum up, I really enjoyed these three weeks and I’m looking forward to working again with the Brick’R’knowledge system.

The top 3 visitors at MF Bodensee

Last weekend we were at a Maker Faire again, this time in Friedrichshafen close to Lake Constance. The Maker Faire took place concurrently to the HAM Radio trade show, as it had already been like last year. There were radio amateurs from all over the world and their favorite brick sets were, of course, the GHz and the MHz DIY.

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The trade show started out quite well: while we were building up the booth and the show had not yet begun, a guy from Ireland asked me was it possible to buy two brick sets.

Our partner Arduino.org again joined us for the Maker Faire and introduced the new boards Arduino Otto and Arduino Primo.

Arduino_Bodensee

In addition to the bricks, we also displayed different products from our partner Makeblock out of which children especially liked the Music Robot with Xylophone. And we introduced the PCB grip to the crowd, a soldering aid for professionals.

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Ranking of our favorite customers:

3rd place: An elderly woman who bought a Basic set as she “usually” watches her husband building with electronic bricks as she does “not understand any of this kind”…The Basic set will introduce her smoothly to the world of electrical resistors, transistors and capacitors.

2nd place: A vocational school teacher who came to our booth spontaneously asking for „One Arduino coding set, please“. When I carefully asked whether he already knew our brick system, he said: “No, but that’s not a problem. I think it’s cool and I rather buy the set for my school kids now than having to go through all the bureaucracy for getting any school funds.” There was nothing to be added.

Ist place: A little boy, around seven who had a LED strip with his name on his pullover, approached our booth. I tell him that one of the bricks is an “electrical resistor” and before I could explain anything else to him, he interrupted me, stating: “I know, I know. Don’t you have any cooler components?” I looked at him, a little baffled, handing him the p-MOS. “I already know this one”.
I shortly considered what to give him next and handed him the voltage regulator brick. At least, he looked a little more interested than before – but then he turned to the LED bricks and, taking one in his hand, declared: “I would like to buy a RGB LED brick. How much does it cost?”.

Bodensee_5

We introduced the Brick’R’knowledge Solar set at Maker Faire Friedrichshafen for the first time.

You find all information on the new set here:

https://www.brickrknowledge.de/sets/experiments/solar-set/

 

Arduino and Brick’R’knowledge at Maker Faire Bodensee

Today we are happy to share a new blog post by our partner Arduino.org with you. Enjoy!

Together with our partner Allnet this weekend we were at Maker Faire Bodensee. Our common booth received a lot of interest and a lot of questions from the visitors. We presented the Brick’R ‘knowledge innovative plug system and their Arduino compatible coding set.

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Brick_9

Brick_11

Brick_12


What is Brick’R’knowledge?
Brick’R’knowledge is an innovative plug system which can be used to transfer electronical knowledge very easily, quickly and playfully. Brick’R’knowledge premiered at the 2014 maker world in Friedrichshafen. The special thing about this electronic set is that all bricks share universal connectors. This way, even complex circuits can be understood very easily. Even connecting bricks in different angles is possible. For returning the 0 Voltage (ground) two contacts are used. This allows creating compact circuits that are easy to document and easy to be used for exploring and explaining electronic circuits. The brick system addresses not only students, teachers, developers and electronics’ addicts but also the maker scene. The brick system is open source and already involves more than 400 different bricks.

Bricks_angeordnet

Brick_4

The Brick’R’knowledge Arduino Coding Set
The idea behind the Arduino coding set is to give users the possibility to experience analogue and digital electronics and to introduce them to the programming of microcontrollers without any prior knowledge. The attached manual includes descriptions regarding each brick and explains the experiments in easy steps and with the help of clear graphics and pictures. The programming manual provides you with many examples to program your own circuits and to become inspired. The set contains analogue bricks, digital bricks like the 7segment display, Oled displays, digital bus bricks and many more. This way, it is very flexible when it comes to developing your own solutions. As it is very easy to include the popular microcontroller “Arduino Nano” into the brick system, you can easily program and realize complex circuits.

Manuals: https://www.brickrknowledge.de/en/sets/downloads/
Sets: https://www.brickrknowledge.de/en/sets/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/BrickRknowledge/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrickRknowledge

Arduino for dummies

Today I (being a complete beginner regarding Arduino) try to explain the Arduino Nano to soon-to-be programmers.

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First, you connect the battery brick to the adapter. On the Arduino PCB there is a mini USB connector that connects the Arduino with the computer or laptop. Additionally, there are hermaphrodite connectors (you don’t need to remember that one ;)). When we connect different bricks to the adapter, it is as if we connected them directly to the Arduino Nano’s pins. Today, we’ll only have a look at two connectors, namely, the digital “PD2 and PD3” that are equivalent to the Arduino pins 2 and 3. We could actually address these pins individually, that means, we could connect a double-LED to the connector. As we will be working only with a normal LED, however, we just connect pin 2 and 3, that means, we address them both.

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On some parts of the Arduino adapter, you might connect the brick in a different direction – for this you need an extra brick. Today, we don’t go deeper into that topic, though.

Now we open our browser, type www.arduino.org and click on download. You can choose the adequate operating system  (on my PC it would be “Windows installer”, for example) and you can download the file. As usual, you will have to click “accept” several times and…. we are all set and prepared.

 

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You can see this picture now. It is the program we use to write a code. First, we click on “tools”, then on “board” and then we chose our Arduino Nano.

As I mentioned before, I’m not a programmer which is why I explain the starting situation like this:

void setup:  This is the preparation for the following implementation. What is insider here is the starting situation before any other processes or loops begin.

void loop: After the setup has been worked through, everything that is in here will be played in an endless loop. For example: Light on, light off, light on, light off and so on.

{} : Everything that is between these two brackets will be repeated in a loop. Here you have to fill in the content and the brackets define the beginning and the end.

; The semicolon serves as a division between different instructions. Like this, the program know how the code’s different parts are separated. It works like a full stop in a text.

//: Here you can add your own single-line comments for yourself.

The individual parts of our code:

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First, we name our ports. PD2 is called “PORTLED2” and PD3 ist called “PORTLED3”. For our program to know to which pins PORLED2 corresponds to, we tell it the following:

#define PORTLED2 2

We do the same for PORTLED3.

We define the starting situation void setup now. It works like this:

pinMode(PORTLED2,OUTPUT);

The program knows now that PORTLED2 is supposed to be an output and not an input.

Now follows what I like best: the endless loop called void loop. The pins that we’ll use are digital pins which is why we write:

digitalWrite(PORTLED2,HIGH);
digitalWrite(PORTLED3,HIGH);

Both LEDs are switched on to a high level or as I would say: they are illuminated.

As a next step we need to define how long they are supposed to be illuminated. For one second, we have to write 1000, that means, we calculate in milliseconds. When the LED should be illuminated for one second you need to write:

delay(1000);

When the LED should not be illuminated for one second you only need to change HIGH to LOW:

digitalWrite(PORTLED2,LOW);
digitalWrite(PORTLED3,LOW);

delay(1000);

At the end, our loop will be closed with a brick and we managed to coder our very first circuit.

Now we connect the Arduino Nano via the USB to our computer or laptop and click on the checkmark on the left that cause the code to be compiled. That means it tests whether we made any mistakes. Once compiling has been completed we click on the arrow symbol next to the checkmark and our code will be uploaded to the Arduino Nano. When we take it off again and connect our bricks correctly the LED will lighten up every second.

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Test your reaction!

Reaction test with Arduino and our bricks

We’ll present our reaction game to you today that we did with our bricks and the Arduino Nano. Below, you’ll find the according code and you can watch the YouTube video here.

Have fun programming and testing your reaction!

Once you’ve connected the battery you are in the main menu. To get to the first level you need to shortly press the button. The yellow onboard LED will lighten up for a certain amount of time in which you need to keep pressing the button. If you successfully do this, the yellow LED brick will lighten up and you will enter the next level.

The time you have to press the button becomes shorter and shorter. After three failed attempts, that means, when the red LED lightens up, you’ll get back to the main menu. Once you’ve managed the last level, both LEDs will lighten up.

Here is the code for the Arduino:

/*

Authors:Michael Steidl, Maria Hoffmann

Date: 04.06.2016

Licence: GPL v2

 

Reaction game

 

*/

 

#define GREENLED 2

#define REDLED 3

#define SWITCH 4

 

int GELBELED = 13;

int reactionTime = 500;

int subTime = 50;

int winningTime = 150;

int errors = 0;

boolean game = false;

 

void menu();

void ingame();

void resetAllValues();

 

void setup()

{

pinMode(GREENLED, OUTPUT);

pinMode(REDLED, OUTPUT);

pinMode(SWITCH, INPUT_PULLUP);

pinMode(GELBELED, OUTPUT);

}

 

void resetAllValues()

{

int reactionTime = 500;

int subTime = 50;

int winningTime = 150;

int errors = 0;

}

 

void menu()

{

if(digitalRead(SWITCH)==LOW)

{

game = true;

}

digitalWrite(GREENLED, HIGH);

digitalWrite(REDLED, HIGH);

delay(200);

if(digitalRead(SWITCH)==LOW)

{

game = true;

}

digitalWrite(GREENLED, LOW);

digitalWrite(REDLED, LOW);

delay(200);

}

 

void ingame()

{

delay(3000);

 

digitalWrite(GELBELED,HIGH);

delay(reactionTime);

digitalWrite(GELBELED,LOW);

 

if(digitalRead(SWITCH)==LOW) //gedrückt

{

//Decrease Reaction Time

reactionTime = reactionTime – subTime;

if(reactionTime <= winningTime || reactionTime <= 0)

{

game = false;

resetAllValues();

}

digitalWrite(GREENLED,HIGH);

delay(1500);

digitalWrite(GREENLED,LOW);

}

else

{

errors++;

if(errors >= 3)

{

game = false;

resetAllValues();

}

digitalWrite(REDLED,HIGH);

delay(1500);

digitalWrite(REDLED,LOW);

}

}

 

void loop()

{

if(game == false)

{

menu();

}

else

{

ingame();

}

}

 

 

My first Maker Faire

I would like to tell you about my first Maker Faire experience in Hanover in which I participated two weeks ago. The whole Berlin team was present as well as Julia who came from Germering. The Maker Faire took place from Friday to Sunday, Friday being a “school day” for students and teachers while the weekend was open for everyone. Watch the video here.
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It was a really interesting event: Visitors could see, learn and experiment many new things. It was too bad that I did not have enough time to walk around and see what other makers had created. It would have been worth it, I’m sure.
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Our booth was highly frequented; I would not have expected so many people and such a continuous positive feedback. Many were interested in the bricks, from teachers to students, from electronics technicians to simply enthusiasts. The little kids adored our 7 Color Light Set’s LED bricks and spent a long time at our booth creating various motives.
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I also recognized three university students who spent more than an hour building their own circuits and rebuilding experiments from the Advanced manual.
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I very much enjoyed seeing so many happy, inspired and enthusiastic visitors in one spot. I also talked to and shared ideas with many cool Makers during the event.

Finally, I’d like to add that I am already looking forward to the next Maker Faire Bodensee. You can definitely see and learn a lot while having fun at the Maker Faire!

Mohamed