First lab - getting the breadboard to work
OK, so the first lab went really well. It was all very satisfying even if some experiments did not work out completely. I was in the lab, playing, for about 3 hours on Monday afternoon. My first job was to get the power adaptor plug soldered and working. Todd was giving a quick demonstration and I watched his soldering techniques carefully... shouldn't be too difficult. So the iron is hot and ready, I tin the tip of the iron with solder and quickly sponge it. ok, all's good so far. Now i'm trying to get the solder onto the wires of the adaptor and this turned out to several attempts and about a half hour till I was satisfied.
The best tip I discovered when heating and applying solder is to get the components hot then touch the solder with the heat. When a drip connects the pieces together, slowly pet the droplet with the tip and edge of the iron, it really smoothed out the last spots I was fixing. Here is a picture of the adaptor with wire soldered.
Next was time to test the power. I put a 5V voltage regulator on the board, with some jumpers going to the bus runs. I had a LED and resistor to verify power. And tada!
I decided to make the breadboard look nice and neat the entire time. So I started to trim the jumpers down and place the power test LED at the bottom of the board.
The rest of the time in the lab I spent playing around rearranging and finding misc. electronics to plug into the board. The first test was the LED chaingang. 2 LED's worked in serial, 3 didn't.
I soldered my Potentiometer with the Red (power), Green (data), black (ground) and plugged it into the board to vary the resistance of my LED. Once I got the correct RGB wiring and not RBG the poteniometer was easy to use.
Next I replaced the Potentiometer with a photoresistor. I like the photoresistors, I think I will explore them more later - perhaps to detect shadows and shapes of shadows.
After some searching the junk shelf I found a little speaker, a noisemaker. Similar to the annoying sound of a smoke detector, the potentiometer made it a little fun -like a poorly made guitar.
Found a momentary switch/button on the shelf and replaced the potentiometer. I made a little horn.
Towards the end of the experimenting I found an old Microsoft mouse which I quickly chopped the end off of to see what wires lay inside. There were 5 - red, black, white, blue and orange. I hooked up the red and black to the power and ground then took all the wires from the blue, white and orange and twisted them together to make them share their juice. My multimeter found 5V at the red and black connection but nothing happened elsewhere. It would have been neat to use the mouse to vary the resistance and make the noisemaker play. I'll google microsoft mouse wiring right now and see if I can find anything.
The best tip I discovered when heating and applying solder is to get the components hot then touch the solder with the heat. When a drip connects the pieces together, slowly pet the droplet with the tip and edge of the iron, it really smoothed out the last spots I was fixing. Here is a picture of the adaptor with wire soldered.
Next was time to test the power. I put a 5V voltage regulator on the board, with some jumpers going to the bus runs. I had a LED and resistor to verify power. And tada!
I decided to make the breadboard look nice and neat the entire time. So I started to trim the jumpers down and place the power test LED at the bottom of the board.
The rest of the time in the lab I spent playing around rearranging and finding misc. electronics to plug into the board. The first test was the LED chaingang. 2 LED's worked in serial, 3 didn't.
I soldered my Potentiometer with the Red (power), Green (data), black (ground) and plugged it into the board to vary the resistance of my LED. Once I got the correct RGB wiring and not RBG the poteniometer was easy to use.
Next I replaced the Potentiometer with a photoresistor. I like the photoresistors, I think I will explore them more later - perhaps to detect shadows and shapes of shadows.
After some searching the junk shelf I found a little speaker, a noisemaker. Similar to the annoying sound of a smoke detector, the potentiometer made it a little fun -like a poorly made guitar.
Found a momentary switch/button on the shelf and replaced the potentiometer. I made a little horn.
Towards the end of the experimenting I found an old Microsoft mouse which I quickly chopped the end off of to see what wires lay inside. There were 5 - red, black, white, blue and orange. I hooked up the red and black to the power and ground then took all the wires from the blue, white and orange and twisted them together to make them share their juice. My multimeter found 5V at the red and black connection but nothing happened elsewhere. It would have been neat to use the mouse to vary the resistance and make the noisemaker play. I'll google microsoft mouse wiring right now and see if I can find anything.
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