CH4-B - Button Press

We'll use Maker Tape to connect the Button and LED to the Bit Board on a LEGO baseplate.

We've already connected an LED in Chapter 1 so our new addition this time is the Button.

We'll connect our LED to Pin 1 and our Button to Pin 4.

And of course we'll connect the Ground (GND) sides of each component to Ground on the Bit Board.

You'll notice the Ground on the Bit Board (as well as the LED and other Crazy Circuits components we'll use) is color coded White.

While the LED has Polarity our Button does not. If you connect it the other way around it will still work fine. Not all components have Polarity.

If you've never used a micro:bit before you'll want to check out this guide: Bit Board V2 Setup and Use

We're going to load the following code for our Button Press program: https://makecode.microbit.org/_ghw7KwC7J...

This code will turn on the LED when the button is pressed, and then the LED will stay on for 3 seconds before it turns off.

For this code we are using two variables, buttonValue to hold the result of digital read pin, and onTime to hold the number of milliseconds the LED will stay on.

We've also got two separate forever blocks, one which reads the value of Pin 4, and one which acts upon the that value by looking at the buttonValue variable.

Once the code is loaded it should start running immediately.

You can power the micro:bit via the USB cable you used to load the code or you can use a battery pack plugged into the Bit Board.

The LED should turn on when the button is pressed, stay on for 3 seconds, and then turn off.

Follow along with our recorded Live Stream!

You can watch the full video of us walking through this project, along with explaining and exploring the code: https://www.youtube.com/live/sWfe8znn6C0