Bouncing Multicolored LED line

This is an arduino controlled project and uses leds, jumper wires, and a breadboard. This is one of my first attempts on programming arduino and I am pleased with the outcome. I'm ten years old and I just started programming 2 weeks ago.

Step 1 Parts Check

Let's make sure we have all the correct parts. We need a large breadboard, 4 green LEDs, 4 yellow LEDs, 3 red LEDs, an arduino, and  about 25 jumper wires.  The arduino I used was the UNO smd, but it might work with older or newer versions also.

Comments

[CreativeTinker]

Fantastic you guys and gals. Keep it up!

[chough42]

I just made your project -- my second Arduino project to date. Actually, my son and I made it together -- it's beautiful really, a ten-year-old (you) teaching a thirty-six-year-old (me) teaching a seven-year-old (my son) electronics... and all thanks to open source hardware and software.

We did find a bug around line 54 (I think)...
digitalWrite(LED06, LOW);
delay(30);

Should insert:

digitalWrite(LED07, HIGH);
delay(30);

...which was great, because it was that bug that made all of this click for my son. We were playing with the timing, mainly making it faster. Finally, we slowed it down to one instruction per second and noticed the one LED wasn't lighting. This allowed me to show him, line by line, each instruction as it triggered. We found the error, fixed the code, and high-fived.

Anyway, thanks for the 'ible.' And make sure to tell your dad or mom that some other random dad said you're great. Thanks for the lesson.  Seriously.

[future-tinker]

You should add a shift register.

[Qtechknow]

What is a shift register and what would it do for this project?

[vdiena]

I would reccomend you google them - Google, your first stop for answers ;)
Now, since im such a nice dude - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:4-Bit_PISO_Shift_Register_Seq.gif
& http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_register

Basically you send it a load of 0s & 1s to one pin, and it sends each of them out to a dedicated pin -
So if i send the sequence 100 000 00 to my shift register on its "in" pin - the 8 outs would then be configured like this :
Pin 1 : ON(1);
pin 2-8 : OFF (0);

This can ofc be varied like you want to - Shift registers are usefull if you want to save pins :)

[future-tinker]

Nice work. I'm about your age and I did something similar to this, but I added a variable resistor to change the speed.