When I did the lab Tone output and Servo motor control, I failed for the first two times and I couldn’t find the reason why it didn’t work. So I asked our teacher Jeff and he suggested dividing the whole circuit into different parts and check them separately, and drawing a schematic to see what’s going on. So in the process of drawing and checking, I found I plugged a wire to a negative bus while it should be plugged to a positive one. This small change made the servo motor spin up.
For midterm project, I and Athena met twice this week to talk about ideas and steps to realize them. After brainstorming, we decided to make a prophetic crystal ball that gives answer based on heart rate and temperature. So we have temperature and heart rate as input which are measured by a thermistor and a heart rate sensor; the output are led and sound, using leds and a speaker.
We started at the heart rate sensor. We borrowed one from fabrication lab and got a lot of help from Jeff and David in the workshop. But frustratingly, after checking hundreds of time the code and the circuit and the sensor itself(we did some soldering and unsoldering), we still couldn’t make the sensor work. So we decided to work on other parts, the thermistor and the speaker first.