Newbei Q - Basic Stamp Activity Kit

markcnz

Hi, I have searched the forum but could not really find the info I'm looking for so hopefully someone can help... My son and I are doing the activities together and the question came up about the LED activity, of course.. lol

He wants to use a blinking bicolored LED in one of his models as decoration -- Chapter 2 Activity 5. Where you use current direction in the microcontroller to change the LED color.

How do we do this without having to put the entire Basic Stamp HomeWork Board into the model? I'm thinking we can just program a small microcontoller give it a power source and LED and we are off. This sounds easy enough to me but is it really that easy to do? Some help here would be great please.

Thanks,
Mark

Mike Green

You could certainly program a small microcontroller to blink and change the color of an LED and there are some where you'd only need the microcontroller chip itself, a battery, the LED, and a current limiting resistor and that would make a small package that might fit entirely within a small model. The Stamps are mostly larger than that although you might look at the BS1 for a smaller module that would be capable of doing what you want. If you'd use some other microcontroller, you'd have to get more new "stuff" and learn how to program the new microcontroller in addition to getting good at soldering ... not a bad thing, but maybe more than you expected.

You could also solder long wires onto the LED's pins, plug those into the HomeWork Board in place of the LED and put just the LED into the model. That'll work fine with wires up to several feet in length. You could use wire that's hard to see and hide the wire and HomeWork Board out of sight.

markcnz

That's great. Thanks for the info.