Engduino Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will make a program that will allow for interaction between TouchDevelop and

the Engduino. This tutorial will assume that you have completed the Conditional Statements and

Iteration Tutorials.

So what is an Engduino?

The Engduino is a small computer that takes both

inputs and gives outputs. For example, we can create

a program for the Engduino so that the lights will

react to the acceleration of the device.

Before we begin, we will require the Engduino

Library.

 Click on

everything,

and type in

“Engduino

Library”.

 You should find an entry

created by Michal Moskal. Click

on the Edit button. Now you have access to the Engduino Library

Now let’s begin!

 Create a new script with a blank

template, and give it a memorable

name.

We installed the Engduino Library, but we now need this program to be able to access it.

 Click on the “add new

action, event” button

and then select library

and finally select

Engduino.

We have the library in the program. In order for the program to be able to do anything, the

Engduino must be started.

 Type in Engduino then Init into the main

function

 Try running the program now by clicking

Run

The Engduino Library requires us to use the gameloop event. An event will run code whenever, the

event is triggered. In this case, the gameloop event is triggered as soon as the previous gameloop

event has finished.

Let’s explore how this works

 Click on “add new

action event”.

 Then search for “event” and click on it. Then search

for gameloop and click on that.

Let’s turn the lights on and make it red.

What about making them blink? We need to turn on the lights and turn off the lights. To turn off the

lights, we set the colour to black.

Hang on! Why are the lights black? This is because the gameloop runs so fast that after turning the

lights on to red, the code immediately sets the lights back to off. Let’s add a delay to the code to

make it do what we wanted.

Now the lights blink red. Let’s make the lights change colour depending on if the button is pressed or

not. To do this, we can use if blocks.

This code will make the Engduino blink its lights red if the button is pressed, otherwise it will blink

green

Exercises:

1. Change the colour to blue instead of green in the last example

2. Make the lights blink slower. Hint: The number beside the delay word represents how many

milliseconds the code should wait

3. Modify the code so that the Engduino will turn on the lights to red if the button pressed,

otherwise turn the lights off

Mark Scheme

The child should also try

setting the colour to random

The number inside delay can be

increased as far as the child

likes. The larger the values, the

longer the blink. Encourage the

child to test what happens if

the two delay values are

different

Of course, the colour could

be set to any other colour.

Try setting the colour to

random