Traffic Lights - Part 1: Wiring

When we started our Raspberry Pi traffic lights for Lego cars project, we already had little experience with wiring LEDs and we started by planning the wiring. Instead of drawing the plans by hand, we used a free program called Fritzing. Fritzing is easy to use and has most common components that can be dragged and connected together to create circuits. It then automatically creates a circuit diagram, which is nice. 

Fritzing Breadboard view

Fritzing Schematic view

It was our first time using a breadboard so we had to learn how to use it. It's pretty simple, you just have to know which way the rows are connected. Most of the rows are connected horizontally, but larger boards have two vertically connected, so called power rails, on both sides. Then there are smaller ones that only have horizontally connected rows. We have one of both, but we are using the larger one for this project because it's the one that's Lego compatible, so we can build stuff around it.

After all the planning done, it was time to start actually wiring. We did a quick test to just light up one LED on the breadboard first and it worked fine. Then we just followed our plan and wired all the resistors and LEDs. We had to cut some of the jumper leads with scissors to modify their length so we got the colors just right according to our plan. Other than that it was pretty smooth sailing and Kaisla did most of the wiring, I just needed to help a little here and there.

With wiring done, it was time to test it. We obviously hadn't programmed the traffic lights yet, so we needed some other way to test that the wiring works correctly. I found an awesome Android app called GPIO Tool For Raspberry Pi that connects to RPi using SSH (which I had already set up previously) and allows to set GPIO pins on and off by just pressing buttons on the phone.

Everything worked correctly and it was fun to control the traffic lights manually with the app. If only there was a way to control real traffic lights with an app the same way!

We have already come a long way, but there's still lot of work to do. We must build a "casing" or structure of some kind (using Legos) to hold the breadboard and the Raspberry Pi and of course we must do the actual programming of the traffic lights. We have been observing the traffic light patterns while driving so we know how to do it correctly. But this is enough for now, to be continued in Part 2: Coding & Buiding.