Weekend Arduino Projects for Parents and Kids — “LED traffic light — Ready, set, go!”

Start and complete a traffic light LED Arduino project this weekend with your child! It will be a fun and engaging time spent this weekend. Both you and your child can learn electronics together, be amazed at how child views the world.

Project 1: “LED traffic light — Ready, set, go!”

In this project you will be building a simple traffic light. Through this project you’ll learn circuit connection through breadboard. What is a breadboard and what does it do? Don’t worry, we’ll get our hands dirty once we start wiring up a simple circuit to make our simple traffic light work.

Hardware and Software

Here is the is of things we need to complete this short project.

1. MacOS or Windows
2. Arduino Uno
3. 3 pieces of LED (your choice of any colors really!)
4. Few connectors / wires.
5. 1 USB connector (usually comes with Arduino, see image below)
6. 1 breadboard
7. mBlock Software

All the hardware you need to complete this project

If you have not setup the mBlock software before, visit the earlier project to get a good idea of how to setup and connect the Arduino with mBlock.

Quick Intro to Breadboard

So before we really dive into this project, the breadboard is THE important piece of hardware that we want to understand a little more. A breadboard will help us connect different types of hardware together in a more organized way so as our project gets slightly bigger, we can still organize our projects in a safe and understandable way.

We can imagine how a breadboard is connected by looking at a smaller version.

Front view of a small breadboard