LED Bar Graph: Testing the Ardweeny

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A while ago I purchased an Ardweeny kit, but hadn’t put it together and tested it until now. The Ardweeny is a small, breadboard friendly Arduino clone. In fact, it is the smallest Arduino clone that I know of, and the tiny board is backpacked on top of the ATMega chip.

Here are the parts laid out before I put the Ardweeny together: PCB, ATMega, headers and 7 parts. Tip: double check that you received the correct parts; I received a 470K Ohm resistor (yellow-violet-yellow) instead of a 470 Ohm (yellow-violet-brown) one.

The assembly manual that comes with the Ardweeny is illustrated in color, and explains how to put it together in great detail, step-by-step. It is a very easy kit to put together, perfect for a beginner. There isn’t a lot of soldering involved, either. (There are only 7 parts after all!)

Here is the final product, assembled and ready to go! Isn’t it tiny? The Ardweeny comes preloaded with the “Blink” sketch. In order to program it you will need an FTDI breakout board and USB miniB cable. Upon hooking it up for the first time the green LED should blink.

To test it I put together a simple circuit connecting a LED bar graph display and a variable resistor to the Ardweeny. Turning the dial on the trimpot lights the LEDs on the bar graph display accordingly. Here’s the setup:

Here’s the schematic showing how the circuit was wired:

Here’s a quick video of the Ardweeny in action.

And here’s the sketch:

// www.TheElectronicsHobbyist.com/blog
// Natalia Fargasch Norman
// Trimpot display using LED bar graph

// loop variables and trimpot reading
int i, j, val;

void setup() {
  for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    pinMode(i, OUTPUT);
  }
}

void loop() {
  for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    digitalWrite(i, HIGH);
  }
  // trimpot connected to analog pin 0
  val = analogRead(0);
  // analogRead returns number
  // between 0 and 1023, scaling
  // for the 10 LEDs in the bar graph
  j = val / 100;
  for (i = 0; i < j; i++) {
    // LED bar graph is common anode, LOW is on
    digitalWrite(i, LOW);
  }
}

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Tagged as: Ardweeny, circuit, code, kit, LED bar graph, schematic, sketch, soldering, video