Overview:
For this project, we stayed with our previous groups, so as before I was paired with my good friends Patrick Heslip, Mikey Harris, and Benjamin Franks. First, came learning about basic circuits through batteries, alligator clip wires, light bulbs, and nichrome wire resistors.During this stage, we were split into partners so as to get more hands-on individual time with the mechanics and topics. I performed these experiments with Michael Harris, but as the circuits got more and more massive, we ended up having to join back to a group of four as they were simply not enough materials for each pair to do the circuit on their own. We were later shown the breadboard. This lets us shrink our circuits to the size of a palm. They were very confusing at first, but as we used them more, they became simple and easy. Then we were introduced to the arduino unos and in this, our final project for this unit. The arduinos allowed us to program our lights and more using the C and C++ languages. myself and Mikey decided to join Noah Prochnow and Eric Cheng in the final coding project. This project was to create a robot art show. Simple as that. It's all on us and our ideas and creativity. So the four of us created the project shown below.
Final project:
The four of us decided to code LED's to flash in time with Darude - Sandstorm, the hit internet troll song. Sounds simple right? Anything but. When we put our final code, which got us to 1:15 into the song, into a word document, it was 75 pages long, and included over 2,000 handwritten lines of code. A video of the project as well as the code itself is included below.
Concepts:
Circuit: A circuit is a complete loop of electrical conductors including a power source
Parallel Circuit: The current has a "choice" between two paths. They have the same voltage, but can have different current through them.
Series Circuit: The current has to flow across two or more resistors in one path voltage is split, but current is the same through both.
Resistance: A force against the current, weakening it.
Current: The flow of electricity in a circuit (literally the flow of elections) from positive to negative, or vice versa.
Voltage: The difference in potential energy across a circuit, also described as the push or pull of electricity.
Parallel Circuit: The current has a "choice" between two paths. They have the same voltage, but can have different current through them.
Series Circuit: The current has to flow across two or more resistors in one path voltage is split, but current is the same through both.
Resistance: A force against the current, weakening it.
Current: The flow of electricity in a circuit (literally the flow of elections) from positive to negative, or vice versa.
Voltage: The difference in potential energy across a circuit, also described as the push or pull of electricity.
reflection:
This was a great project with many peaks and not really any pits. One peak was time management. We worked hard on the program for a solid few days, and were able to finish much more than expected. I only thought that we could get through 1 minute of the song, but we got much past that. Another peak was cooperation. We all worked hard, and we had no problem making one of the projects that I am most proud of.
We really didn't have many pits. One was "rage". When we couldn't figure out how to use the breadboards; it was very frustrating and difficult until we learned how to use them. Another pit was the semicolon. If you missed a semicolon after any line of code, it wouldn't work and we'd have to go through our whole code to find the one missing semicolon. This was a fun project, and definitely one of my favorites with arguably the best results of any project as well.
We really didn't have many pits. One was "rage". When we couldn't figure out how to use the breadboards; it was very frustrating and difficult until we learned how to use them. Another pit was the semicolon. If you missed a semicolon after any line of code, it wouldn't work and we'd have to go through our whole code to find the one missing semicolon. This was a fun project, and definitely one of my favorites with arguably the best results of any project as well.