Introduction: 6 Years Old Creating Basic Traffic Light With Scratch for Arduino

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About: arduino fan

My son was already curious with my Arduino projects. He played for a while with Snap Circuits and LEGO

He also started to build some Scratch projects.

It was only a matter of time for us to play with Scratch for Arduino.

This is our first project. Objective was to make him familiar with the board and wires and see something from the computer to the board.

Step 1: Installing Scratch for Arduino

Please visit the site http://s4a.cat/

From their website:

About S4A


S4A is a Scratch modification that allows for simple programming of the Arduino open source hardware platform. It provides new blocks for managing sensors and actuators connected to Arduino. There is also a sensors report board similar to the PicoBoard one. The main aim of the project is attracting people to the programming world. The goal is also to provide a high level interface to Arduino programmers with functionalities such as interacting with a set of boards through user events.

Installing the Firmware into your Arduino

3 steps


This firmware is a piece of software you need to install into your Arduino board to be able to communicate with it from S4A.

Download and install the Arduino environment by following the instructions on http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software.

Take in account Arduino Uno requires at least version 0022.Download our firmware from here

Connect your Arduino board to a USB port in your computerOpen the firmware file (S4AFirmware16.ino) from the Arduino environmentIn the Tools menu, select the board version and the serial port where the board is connected

Load the firmware into your board through File > Upload

Step 2: Material

You will need:

A very curious 6 years old ;)

1 Arduino Board

3 LEDs ( green, yellow, red)

Wires

( you can add the resistor, but since this was the first one, I wanted to keep it simple)

Step 3: Block Code

I used https://www.tinkercad.com/ to create the sketch and the code, printed in a A3 page to serve as a model. He is very used to lego, so translating from paper to "hardware" was no issue at all

We already worked with Scratch, so he is familiar with the blocks. The code is basically telling:

one light to turn on

wait

light to turn off

turn the next light on

wait

turn the light off

and turn the last light on

wait

start over again :)