Video tutorials -

• Electronics

Don’t worry about which electrical contact you connect to the positive or negative output terminals of the speed controller. The cables can always be swapped later.

Do not solder anything to the speed controller.

If you screw the bolts too far into the motor, it may stop working. This won’t be an issue later, but if it causes problems now, place a few nuts on the bolt before using it. This will stop the bolt from going too deep into the motor.

The dip switch is mounted by using the holes that are already placed on the PCB board.

If you’ve connected everything correctly, you can now turn on the motor and control its speed using the potentiometer.

The potentiometer is the small knob on the motor speed controller that you can rotate.

It doesn’t matter if you connect the wire to the positive (cathode) or the negative (anode) terminal of the battery.

Note that for power sources, the cathode and anode are marked opposite to that of diodes and other electronics. In them, the cathode is the positive terminal and the anode is the negative one.

Before you connect wires in your project, you need to take off the plastic covering (insulation) at the ends so the metal wire is exposed. This is called stripping the wire. You can do it with a wire stripper or even with simple tools you may have at home.

Answering three questions:

Why - because we believe any student and basically anybody must have a basic understanding of how electronic works. This course gives us the chance to present it and to move forward to better and smarter robots.

How - we do videos, we set tasks. You solve them.

What - we are using Arduino. Because it is popular, it is easy and we like it. 

This is a course for beginners, but the tasks would be interesting and for more intermediate students. We do not expect any previous knowledge from you except for how to divide numbers and use a computer. 

It is a hardware/software related course. You need a set with parts. And you need a number of sets for a class of students. You can buy the set from us, from other vendors, from online retailers. It doesn`t matter actually as long as you have the needed parts for the course. We have tried to create a very lean set, but if you can afford to buy additional parts you could create more complex and probably more interesting devices. 

The course is designed for classes of students, but it could also be used personally. Each module should take you about 20 minutes and depending on how long your student hours are and how much time you will leave the students to experiment and solve tasks you could include different numbers of modules in your class.

Why: It's an easy and fun example to introduce you to Arduino

How: Presenting questions and trying answer this questions. Experimenting with different tasks.

What: We would like to show you how to control a diode. We would build a device and write programs for this device.

End Result: A blinking diode

The course is very suitable for students and you don't have to buy a new set for each student. You can group them, divide them, organize the use of the sets and you could technically work with 70-80 student with only 6 sets. 

Arduino programs are developed with a software and this software is downloaded from the http://arduino.cc site.