My motivation for this project was to create something fairly practical. The idea was to make something sort of like a counter/timer. When one button is pressed, the number on the display will go up by one, when the other button is pressed, the number on the screen will go down by one. However, I also wanted to add in the element of the numbers on the display ticking through by themselves if one button was held (in total, there were supposed to be three buttons that were of use) and then released. However, if the button was pushed again, it would stop and just continue to be used as another counter button.
Power flows through my setup by connecting each corresponding wire with it’s appropriate segment on the seven segment display. As the appropriate wires are connected to each segment, they light up each LED segment on the display. The buttons are also connected to the board and to the seven segment display through the appropriate wiring to the powersource (circuit board). In order to set this up, you must connect everything correctly and then run Arduino. After this, the buttons should work as the first button counts up, the second counts down and the third is what you would hold to allow all of the numbers (0-9) to cycle through on their own.
Seeing as though my project doesn’t necessarily work as I was having trouble trying to make all three buttons work together in the code, I do think that the idea could be useful as either a timer or just a simple counter object. I would certainly improve the code itself and my understanding of the code. I understand how the project works in theory and how to wire everything, the only thing I was getting stuck on was how to make all three buttons work in the same setup. I learned that making sure the code will work before attempting a project is vital in making sure that the entire setup will be able to work in the end. (I rearranged the code so as to make it so that two buttons would work with the seven segment display, allowing for the setup to still work as a counting device, however, the third button does not work with this setup therefore nothing is constantly changing in this setup).
