My school is fortunate enough to offer Electronics as a subject in year 12 and 13. I did it last year and continued it this year. It is a really cool subject, especially this year because we get to play with Picaxe microcontrollers and Lego robots. The last standard I completed in Electronics was the programming unit. For the Picaxe, we programmed them in basic.

For this project, we get a Picaxe and we make a circuit that we program with the microcontroller. For the standard, you need at least 2 inputs and 2 outputs of any kind. For this, I decided to do a Pedestrian Light simulation. For this, you push a button and it starts the pedestrian lights and then it simulates the traffic lights to stop the cars and shows the light for the person. All the timings are accurate for this simulation and it worked. You can see a video of this here. (Mute video/speakers before playing.) This is my friend Martin’s version of it, which works exactly the same as mine, the only difference being the code and the type of Picaxe used.

Another interesting Picaxe project that I must talk about is that of my friend Morgan’s. He built a Collision Avoidance Robot which is controlled by the Picaxe microcontroller. His program looks far more complex than the Pedestian Light simulation ones and it probably was. The base of the robot was pre-built from some other kit but he added the breadboard with wiring onto it as well as some bumpers to it. When the bumpers get pressed, it gets the robot to turn away. Although it looks simple enough, I can tell you, the construction of the bumpers was quite hard, for some more than others. (Aaron *cough*) A video of the Collision Avoidance Robot he made can be seen here.

Playing with the Picaxe was really awesome and it was really cool to have done a project like this. It was also really cool to see the robot Morgan had made, it was amazing. For a lot of people, this is going to look like child’s play but how many people can actually do this, not many. For me the programming was the best part, I guess I just enjoy trying to solve problems and make little things like this. Next up, its Robotic Lego time

Related posts:

1. The Lego Bots
2. Files Destroyed!
3. Holidays Are Go!
4. Back To School
5. An Update