Reaction Timer

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Contributors: Nate
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Push It!

Mental chronometry is the study of how fast humans react to different inputs. It takes a few hundred milliseconds for the signal to get from your eyes, to your brain, out to your limbs to respond. The reaction timer is a great project to demonstrate this time delay. It also makes for a fun game between friends!

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It took 178ms to hit the button!

The principal of the reaction timer is simple: when the user sees the light turn on, press the button! A microcontroller is perfect for this because it can time milliseconds very accurately.

Required Materials

Here's a list of parts used in this project:

Wishlist to all of these parts

Suggested Reading

This tutorial assumes you know a few things about Arduino and serial communication. If you're a bit rusty consider checking out these tutorials: