Week 1 Day 3

Today we did not have a lot of obvious forward movement on the project but the team did make a lot of progress with foundation skills. We also had a pretty productive team meeting. The whole day was devoted to learning the Arduino. The start of the day was focused on just a basic intro to Arduino. We watched the Ted Talk and Nick introduced us to a robot that he slapped together before he knew what he was doing. After our first break we took a look at several sketches and broke down the code step by step to learn the syntax. After that... Lunch!

When we got back from lunch we started out with our team meeting. We discussed our plan for the week with Dr. Fu and Yixing. Tomorrow we will meet in the morning for a soldering workshop. After that we will put together a simple temperature probe and practice setting it up for wireless communication. Once we have that down we will move on to the other probes until we can make them all work as expected. After that we will build the sensor clusters and start on the nightmare of cleaning up last years code. After those two took off we discussed what control system we wanted to include in our project. We decided to do a basic water level monitor for our artificial stream system.

The afternoon was devoted to actually building stuff with the Arduino and the breadboards. We started out on the tail end of our team meeting. Mike took his traveling light program from yesterday and flipped it so that the traveler was the negative value instead of the positive. Then he and Deliah made a model traffic light.

After our play time was over we went back to the seminar room and did some hands on practice with simple circuits. The first thing they built was a potentiometer switch that let you toggle between a red and green LED. The next was more complicated. They assembled a keypad and speaker. When they entered the correct code the speaker played a tone for 5 seconds. There was a bit of an issue since the orientation of the keyboard actually did matter on the breadboard and most people put it in backwards on the first try. The point of these two circuits was to show how much simpler it was to use a microprocessor rather than trying to do the entire process with ICs.