Week 7 thoughts

What I learned:

-No matter what you're doing you have to troubleshoot. At several different instances building my sensor I thought I had problems when it turned out I didn't have any problems at all. First, after setting up the circuit on the breadboard for my sensor to hook up to the computer I wasn't able to get the LED to light up. Switched out the LEDs to see if that was the problem, rewired everything to try to figure out what I did wrong, but nothing worked. Finally Jim suggested that I just plug it into the computer and see what happened. Turns out the circuit was set up fine, and as soon as I wrote a program the LED blink as it was supposed to.

Next I hooked everything up with the variable resistor to prepare for the connection of the thermistor. After connecting the variable resistor and changing the resistance I saw no change in the output on the computer. Kept trying and trying to figure out why it wasn't changing like it should but nothing was working. Finally decided to hook up the thermistor just to give it a shot. As soon as I had the thermistor wired the output on the computer started doing exactly what it was supposed to and I was able to begin calibrating the sensor just fine. Shows you just have to keep sticking with stuff I guess and eventually you'll figure it out.

What I'm excited about:

-Spring Break! Haha but seriously its pretty cool how fast we are moving in class, almost done with sensors already and getting ready to move on to doing some robotics. I have no idea what to expect when it comes time to build our robots, so I'm really intrigued as to how that is going to go. Pretty pumped to give it a shot!

Suggestions:

-I think everything is going pretty smoothly as of right now so I can't think of anything at the moment that I think needs to change. Just going to keep chugging along