Arduino blog by Niki Ahlskog: Arduino Nano Powered Space rocket

It's been a while since I last time played with Arduino. I got nice idea before Christmas that I would like to create a space rocket which is powered with Arduino for a kid. Original idea was to make it inside kitchen roll, but eventually I decided to do it inside 1,5 liter Coca-Cola bottle. The project started about getting all the equipment I would need.

1. Arduino Nano (small enough)
2. Wires
3. LCD Matrix
4. Buttons
5. Power (9v battery case)
6. Led lights
7. Buzzer
8. Resistors

I wanted the spaceship to have cool blinking led lights, play some audio and also something to "toggle". I decided to do the toggle with button and LCD matrix. Project started by trying the Tone library on my Arduino Uno as it is easier to connect cables in it. I found some cool star wars songs for the tone library and decided to use "the cantina song" as my space ship sound. I have explained how to use the tone library in the previous post, but basically it is just like this:

tone(pin, frequency, duration)

I found Star Wars Cantina song from Google Docs file someone had uploaded so I decided to upload it to GitHub, find the song here: https://github.com/shnigi/arduino-space-ship/blob/master/Star_wars_cantina_song.ino

After checking with Arduino Uno that my program works I started to assemble everything. First I had to solder those small pins on the Arduino Nano board. I had to be very careful not to overheat the pins as it can break the whole board.

Then I connected LCD matrix

Soldering station.

Connecting the LCD module was pretty easy with 5 different pins. To operate the module you will need LedControl library: https://github.com/wayoda/LedControl led matrix patterns can be generated online: http://robojax.com/learn/arduino/8x8LED/ Basically it is just a 1 for ON and 0 OFF. And then it can be written to the LCD as an array.

byte ALL[8]={B11111111,B11111111,B11111111,B11111111,B11111111,B11111111,B11111111,B11111111};

void writeMatrixAll() {
for(int i=0; i<8; i++){
lc.setRow(0,i,0);// this is for blank
}

for (int i=0; i<8; i++){
lc.setRow(0,i,ALL[i]);
}
}

You define which leds on each row should be turned on, then clear the display first and after that just loop through all the rows and turn on lights.

I wanted the space rocket to have 9V battery as its power source since its pretty easy to find such batteries. I also happened to own a 9v battery case with proper wiring and a button to turn on or off.

Arduino Nano can be powered with 9V battery by connecting the cables to Ground and VIN = Voltage In. I also added a button to control the led matrix. Because Arduino is only a stupid circuit controller and can basically do only one thing at a time, I created the code so that between the notes I will check if the button variable has changed. Whole code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/shnigi/arduino-space-ship/blob/master/Avaruusraketti.ino

After soldering everything together I added some hot glue to parts which needed more strength.

Also a red led light was put on the top of the soda bottle. After everything was glued and soldered I started to put everything inside the bottle and strenghtened it with a styrofoam support structure.

Buzzer, LCD matrix, button, 9V battery, led light and Arduino Uno inside 1,5 liter plastic bottle. Finally I just taped to bottom back to its place and decided to add some cardboard wings to make it super cool.