This week we used our Arduino kit to build our very first circuit using a breadboard, resistor, and USB power.

I initially put the basic circuit together and couldn’t get it to work. Luckily my friend Dana was sitting down the table and quickly pointed out that I didn’t have the right resistor. I knew that different color resistors had different ratings, but I didn’t realize that you had to look really closely at the little stripes. So, I thought all of my resistors were the same rating at first.

After that, it was pretty smooth sailing. I put the switch in the wrong direction at first, so it didn’t work. But that was easy to flip around and get working.

The potentiometer was fun. I tried running the circuit with the potentiometer without the resistor to see what would happen and had my first LED blowout (ITP right of passage?).

All in all, watching these little lights light up was pretty satisfying.