CH41-C - Thumbstick LEDs Signals

We'll connect the Thumbstick with a Crazy Circuits Ribbon Cable using all four wires.

Plug the three-wire connector of the Crazy Circuits Ribbon Cable into the row with Pin 0 on the Bit Board. The wire colors should match the pin header colors, with S1 (yellow) going to the yellow pin.

Next, plug S2 (orange) into Pin 13. (S2 is separated from the three-wire connector to allow you to plug it into another row.)

To the Thumbstick plug - (black) into GND, + (red) into +5V; S1 (yellow) into VRx; S2 (orange) into SW.

We won't plug anything into VRy pin for this example.

We used a 3D printed part we designed to hold the Thumbstick in place on a LEGO baseplate.

We attached two 2x4 LEGO Bricks to the bottom of the 3D printed holder to allow it to snap onto the LEGO Baseplate a bit easier. (We also added a few small bricks to hold the ribbon cable in place.)

Alternately you can try to use some LEGO bricks and some rubber bands to hold the sensor in place, or just hold it in your hand.

3D print your own Thumbstick Sensor Holder.

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 Thumbstick LEDs Signals program: https://makecode.microbit.org/_TFsKfCWdm...

In the on start block we'll disable the LED matrix and set Pin 13 to pull up.

In one forever loop we'll read the value of Pin 13, assigning it to buttonVal, and then set blState to either 1 or 0.

In a related forever block we'll check to see if blState and blStatePrev are different, and if so, set the LEDs to the value of blState, which will be 1 or 0. And finally, we'll set blStatePrev to the value of blState.

In the third forever loop we'll set xVal to the value from Pin 0 and then check if the Thumbstick is pressed all the way to the left or all the way to the right, and call the appropriate function.

The functions (signalLeft and signalRight) will display a short 3 pixel animation using the LEDs. We pass in the length of the pause we want after each step of the animation.

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.

Move the Thumbstick left and right and you should see two different "turn signal" animations, one for each direction.

Press the button and the down motion will turn on the LEDs while the up motion will turn off the LEDs.

Follow along with our recorded Live Stream!

(We'll add the video to this step after we do the stream!)