Week 4 Update

 The long awaited lab update😲😲😲

Lab 4: 
I had to fumble through the beginning because I still have not been able to go to the lab and use the multimeter (happening Monday!!) But I watched the full lab 2 video just so I could understand the voltage divider better, and the potentiometer worked perfectly. Adding the LED was a struggle at first, but it was just wiring errors on my part, and eventually I was able to control the brightness with the potentiometer. Here is the completed setup: 

I'm still struggling to comprehend why we divided by 4 to define the brightness value from reading. I assume it has to do with units of measurement, especially since I used 10k resistors for part 1 and switched to 220 for the LED. Need clarification on this. Thanks to our talk in class about PWM, though, I can see how pins 9 and 13 differ. Overall, I'm getting more confident with circuitry, and I think this will make more sense after I connect the dots with lab 2. 

Lab 5:

Lab 5 went really smoothly, much to my surprise because the wiring was a lot more involved than everything else we've done so far. Here's the namesake of this blog admiring his work with the ultrasonic sensor:                                                                                        



One interesting thing I experienced is that I was on Facetime with a friend later on when this was still set up, and they were complaining about a weird continuous sound coming from my end of the call, but I didn't hear anything. After a few minutes of messing with my phone audio, I said "hold on a sec" and unplugged the microcontroller. The sound immediately went away for them. Interesting how the waves from the sensor could be picked up by a microphone.
The only place I encountered issues was with the weather display challenge at the end of the lab. As you can see in the following image, i was able to change what showed on the LCD screen, but it was a repeating statement instead of a constant with multiple lines. After talking about it in class, I learned that I should have recycled the formatting in the original code rather than trying to start from scratch. 



Project Update: 
My facebook marketplace meetup was a success and I got my hands on a typewriter. Aesthetically it's really everything I could've hoped for, I'm excited about it. All of the keys function perfectly, but the "ink" ribbon is really old, and when I tested it, it made letters (yay) but they were very very faint (boo), so I am looking into getting a replacement. I poked around the insides and I think everything is functional, which the seller didn't verify so that is a win. Here's Henry checking it out, it smells like an old person's attic so he was very curious. 
                                        

One potential issue I'm going to have to work out is the logistics of letting people interact. I imagine most folks my age don't know how to load and unload paper into a typewriter, and if I continue with the idea of having users complete a product that they deposit somewhere else, that will be an important step. I feel like leaving instructions would ruin the intimacy of the idea, so not sure how to handle that. 



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