I was recently talking to a high school Design and Technology teacher about changes in their curriculum. They mentioned that they had to teach some rudimentary electronics including logic gates and truth tables. They’d been scratching their head a little until they discovered some logic gate example hardware buried in a cupboard in the Physics department! Whilst many schools might have some old CMOS or TTL logic boards lurking somewhere, this LogicShield for the Arduino Uno could be a great option to teach the fundamentals of logic gates and could also open other avenues for exploration.
Simply this is a very clean and well-laid-out Arduino shield that’s supplied fully assembled. The Arduino Uno is not included, but once you’ve grabbed one from your stock you simply insert the shield using the pin headers, flash the provided Arduino sketch to the Arduino and the demonstration device is ready to teach. You can then press buttons to get simple examples of how the input conditions of various logic gates affect the LED output. You could even get students to write up their own truth tables based on their button presses.
I’ve written about logic gate example hardware before on the Tindie blog and searching across Tindie you can find a lot of logic teaching aids. This one caught our eye though as those who are curious can look at how the logic gates are implemented in the accompanying Arduino sketch. Picking apart and learning about operators in the code is a great stepping stone for people who are going on to look at state machines or perhaps use standalone PLCs and even aspire towards programming FPGAs.
