For the past few years, students in my first semester calculus physics laboratory have explored kinematics (and also a little dynamics) by building and launching model rockets. Working in groups, the students build Estes Big Bertha or Baby Bertha rockets from kits. Then, we travel to a local park to launch the rockets. The rockets

The ATmega328 has a total of three input/output ports, port B, port C, and port D. Two of these ports, namely port B and port D, are associated with the 14 digital input/output pins on the Arduino Uno. Port C is associated with the analog input pins which can also be used as digital input/output

Serial communication is a method for two computers or microcontrollers (or one computer and a microcontroller) to talk to one another. Arduino uses the transistor-transistor logic (TTL) serial protocol. This protocol sends bits using voltages of zero (for a zero bit) and five (for a one bit). Another popular serial protocol is RS-232 which uses

A common-cathode RGB LED has a total of four pins. One of the pins is the cathode which must be connected to ground and the others each control a color. The pinout shown below is for a typical RGB LED. Notice that each of the pins is a slightly different length; the cathode is the

The Arduino Uno is a digital device, but it has an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to allow us to probe the analog signals that permeating our analog world. The ADC is a 10-bit device that can map an analog signal consisting of a voltage ranging from 0 to 5 volts to a decimal value between 0