Lab 1 - Artemis Board

I. Summary

In this lab, the goal was to start up the RedBoard Artemis Nano with the Arduino IDE to ensure that some of the peripherals were working. I wrote very little code in this lab as the majority of the scripts we ran were from the provided SparkFun examples!

II. Blink Example

In this section, we used the example Arduino “Blink It Up” script to flash the LED on and off at a rate of 1 second. Check out the video below to watch it in action!

III. Serial In Example

For the next example script, we used the Serial port of the Artemis Nano. In this script, the user sends information into the serial port and the Artemis Nano echoes it back as the output. Below is a video demonstrating this along with a one-sided conversation I had with the Artemis Nano.

IV. Analog Read example

In this next example script, we use the ananlogRead script to test the on-board temperature sensor on the Artemis Nano. We can see the console output tells us the temperature and along with this information the onboard LED gets brighter as the temperature decreases and dimmer as the temperature increases! Check out the below video where I press my finger on and blow into the temperature sensor.

V. Microphone Output Example

Next, we tested the onboard microphone with the given example script. As we can see in the video, the current detected frequency is output and the sensor is surprisingly accurate! Most of the frequencies are within 10Hz.

VI. Detect A Note Challenge

For the final step in this lab, I was tasked with turning the LED on whenever an A note was played. I chose to detect for A4 which is 440Hz. In order to do this, I had to add two snippets of code to the microphone output example script. The first snippet was to configure the LED which I took from the “Blink It Up” example script in section II. Here is the code that was added to the setup() block:

// initialize digital pin LED_BUILTIN as an output.
  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);

The next piece of code I wrote was the logic to turn the LED on whenever 440Hz was detected. Due to the slight microphone inaccuracies we saw in section V, I made this a range between 435 & 450 Hz. This logic was put into the loop() block:

// Turn on the LED if the frequency is A440
  if (ui32LoudestFrequency > 435 && ui32LoudestFrequency < 450)
  {
    digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH);  // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
  }
  else
  {
    digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW);   // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
  }

The video below showcases the full working system!

VII. Wrap-Up

Overall this lab was a great introduction to using the RedBoard Artemis Nano and I’m excited for the next one!