Personal Retrospective

This has been an amazing and challenging adventure. While this is not, by any means, my first experience with making, circuit building or coding, it was still different because I chose to approach it with a different goal in mind. In past experiences, I have approach these things with either an attitude of: I have to do this because it is part of my requirements for degree or certificate I’m working on; or, I have to figure this out to make it work for this other project I am working on. This time, I approached it with the attitude of: This will be something fun and that I want to learn because it interests me. And, of course, along the way, I developed an idea for a project that I intend to try to build, in which I will use some of the skills I further developed during this adventure.

What was the build you are most proud of and why?

This is a tough call. The dice project was a pretty proud moment because I was not able to make it work the last time I tried to build it. However, I think I would ultimately have to choose the potentiometer controlled electric motor as my proudest build. I would choose this one because it is one that I will actually be able to implement into the project that I am wanting to build in the next few weeks.

Where were you when you started and where did you end up?

When I started this adventure, I was already somewhat familiar with making and the Arduino from having gone through this adventure once before. Also, I was somewhat comfortable with circuit building from other courses I have taken in the past and from working on the electrical systems of houses, as well as repairing small electrical and electronic devices. But, it had been a while since I had done much with any of that, so I was in need of a bit of brushing up. As the weeks progressed, I became more comfortable with my skills and finally was able to develop a few items on my own without having to look up stuff on reference sites and maker shares. Of course, none of what I was able to do independently was any of what we were asked to do for the class. After all, if that were the case, I would not have been working in the ZPD.

What did you learn that you didn’t know before?

I learned that there are some things that I know, but don’t recall without pointed reminders.

How did you actually come to learn this new knowledge?

When we were working on the last build, in which I used a photo resistor to control a servo, I knew that the servo had the ability to move to specific points very precisely but the fact would not come to mind when I was trying to decide what to build for this challenge. I kept asking myself what are servos used for? Instead of simply Googling an answer to my question, I searched for video clips of servos in action to see for myself what kinds of functions servos have been tasked with. As soon as I saw a build of the “Useless Box” project, I recalled how a servo works.

What did you learn about yourself?

This wasn’t so much of a learning, rather a reminding: I love working with my hands, building things and making them work. I had gotten so academic in recent years that I had lost sight of those things and was getting into a rut of constantly doing “book work” and not doing anything in these areas that interest me so much. In fact, I recalled that there are times that I enjoy making something that doesn’t serve any purpose other than to allow me to build, thereby relieving some stress. I will definitely be doing more building and making.

In Reviewing My Blog Posts

Given that most of my students have not been very good writers, I would have loved to get such posts from them. There were things I would have corrected on them, simply because I am a “grammar nazi,” at least according to my students and several friends. But, those are things that had to do with the writing, not the presentations of facts and journeys.

Where did you say your challenges were?

My challenges each week were different. I feel like this is a good sign because it says that I didn’t get stuck in the same struggle each week. Rather, I resolved that struggle and leaned from it so that I could attack and conquer the next challenge that came along. It tells me that I was actually learning and growing in my making circuit building and coding skills.

Moving Forward

This has been an awesome adventure. When it started, I was thinking that I might eventually work toward coding apps for phones and tablets. And, I may still do that. However, for the immediate future, I am looking forward to building a “boosted board” project for my son. If I have the materials, I will even try to build two of them. These will not be the usual powered skate boards with remote controls. Rather, I want something that we can ride off-road, in rough terrain. So, these will be built with large tires and rugged components. Also, they will have handle bars to hold on to for stability. I will use my Arduino kit to build and program the controls for the boards. I will incorporate LEDs for power level indication, potentiometers for speed control and possibly even an audio circuit for fun sound effects. That last is still up for debate. I am old enough to enjoy being goofy. But, my son is about to be 11 years old and may soon be moving out of the stage of wanting to be goofy. Oh well, something to be pondered! I hope to have this project completed within the next 2-3 months. Ideally, it would be ready for his birthday, which will be my first goal date. I will try to share some of the build on here as it progresses.

Maker Vision Sharing

Below, you will find my Maker Vision documents and a link to my eMaze presentation. This has been an interesting and challenging creation that I will continue working on as time progresses.

Maker Space Vision: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1xySt9cL4pPaVIxYV9NVy1Fb0k

Maker Center design: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1xySt9cL4pPTF9wTHNVRDZDRVk

eMaze presentation: https://www.emaze.com/@AWTQWZIC/whs-maker-center

Week 6 - Photo Servo

This week’s adventure was to develop some kind of circuit and code with motors controlled by a sensor. I looked at multiple options, starting with using the temperature sensor to create a servo controlled fan, turning the fan on when the temperature increased too far and turning it off when the temperature dropped sufficiently. However, all of these either required multiple pieces that I didn’t have in my kit or called for multiple Arduinos. So, I switched to looking at the photoresistor as the controlling sensor. I thought about a robotic drummer (with just one stick) and effectively achieved that after a bit of research. I didn’t really have anything that would create a good drumming sound, so just demonstrated the actions. And, I realized that there is another purpose that the same circuit could serve without any change to either circuit or code, only by making a minor change in what the servo activated, physically. I realized that this same circuit would act as a great traffic counter, especially if it was set up with a strong light directed at the photoresistor, then having the servo actuate a physical counter.

Thankfully, this week, the only “issue” I had with the build was finding one that would work like I wanted it to without requiring a bunch of extra stuff that I don’t have. The code and the wiring all worked correctly the first time. I guess it was an omen, because VERY shortly thereafter I developed a tremendous headache that insists on hanging around for a good while. But, it is all good.

Here’s a screenshot of the code I used. It is a very simple code that simply does what is expected of it.

Here is a pic of the circuit. It looks much more complicated than the code! :)

Here’s the schematic I built from.

And, here’s my “Photo Servo” in action.

Final Reflection:

This type of circuit is something I could imagine being used in robotics, especially in an industrial setting. Imagine an industrial robotic arm in an area where humans also work. With a circuit similar to this built into the control of the arm, a simple safety system could be instituted whereby a shadow falling across a photoresistor would pull the arm back to protect the human that created the shadow.

Week 5 - Pot Controlled Electric Motor

This week’s adventure was more of a challenge and more adventurous than previous weeks have been. This week, we were to choose our own circuit to build, then as a challenge, adapt or modify it in some way to make it more useful. At least, that’s how I understood the instructions.

So, with my personal project goal in mind, I chose to first build the electric motor control circuit and understand how it works. Then, when I had that working, after some hair pulling and backtracking, I decided to find a way to use the concept to include a potentiometer to manually control the speed. This, I felt, would give me a better grasp of what I would need to do to achieve a similar effect on the boosted board project I intend to try to build for our son.

Here's my video of Circuit 10 and a bit of explanation of what I did and the troubleshooting I had to go through.

At first, it looked like it was going to be quite simple: just choose one and build it. Unfortunately, after choosing the most likely looking prospect, I found that it would only barely function to adjust speed of the motor within a very narrow range, which did NOT include “off” or zero RPMs. So, I actually had to resort to a “Dummies” site to find a build that would actually work and make the motor run from 0 RPM to full speed, in this case 255 RPM. This build was actually much simpler than any of the others, some of which even included ICs (integrated circuits) which I wanted to try to avoid since the project will ultimately be intended for off-road use in rough terrain. I felt like ICs would be less likely to stand up to the vibrations and stresses of such use.

Here’s a screenshot of the code I used. It is actually very simple compared to some of the others that I looked at.

Here is a pic of the circuit. It actually looks quite simple.

Here’s the schematic I built from. Notice that this is the original, with the change annotated.

So, here is my version of the Pot Controlled Electric Motor in action.

Final Reflection:

This type of circuit is actually quite common in the real world. There are motors in nearly all appliances. Some of them (i.e. refrigerators, dishwashers, etc) are controlled exclusively through set program parameters while others (i.e. blenders, food processors, etc) are at least partially manually controlled. As I have mentioned previously, I intend to make use of this circuit to control the motor of the boosted board project that I want to build for our son. As it is intended to be an off-road, rough terrain vehicle, I prefer to stick to physical components that are more likely to withstand the abuse of off-roading, so no ICs.