This new guide in the Adafruit Learning System goes over the development of State Machines for tracking the state of an electronic project.

What’s a state? Let’s use the example of the states of matter: solid. liquid, and gas (we’ll ignore plasma to keep this simple). There are well defined transitions to move between these states:

• melting transitions from solid to liquid,
• freezing transitions from liquid to solid,
• evaporating transitions from liquid to gas,
• condensing transitions from gas to liquid, and
• sublimating transitions from solid to gas.

Each of these have conditions in terms of material, temperature, and pressure that control whether or not the transition can happen. A simplified example of this is that when its temperature is less than 0C (32F), water will freeze transitioning it from a liquid state to a solid state.

The guide describes two methods using the recently released New Year’s Eve Ball Drop tutorial as a demonstration. Algorithms are coded in CircuitPython.

See more in the guide now online.