Nerd homework

[cdcox]

Originally Posted by Monticore

he just doesn't know how to combine it i think he can't make it do the rest.

Make him show you a working version of 2 and 4. I suspect he does not have those yet. Once he has those working, it is a matter of when he turns on and modulates the light in project 4, he inserts the code from project 2 that modulates its color.

I have been programming on a regular basis for more than 40 years. I built from scratch a website that contains more than 30,000 lines of code. Even with my experience, when I started fiddling with arduino boards (which sounds like what your son is working with) a few years ago out of curiosity, I would have broken the problem your son is working on now into these tiny mini projects.

Literally some of the first things I did with the arduino were to turn on an led, turn on an led with a switch, turn on an led for random periods of time, etc. My goal project was to time how long it took for weighing lever to tip using an accelerometer, and combine that information from a level sensor to calculate the velocity of water flow in a channel. This had nothing to do with leds being on or off. But because I was working in a new ecosystem, I started with the most basic of baby steps. When I built my goal project, it involved maybe half a dozen sub projects along the way. When I fully understood each sub project, composing them into the final project was fairly easy because of the familiarity I had built up working on the sub projects.