1/29/2015 Day 12 of Mechatronics

Day 12 of Mechatronics

I had spent all of my time trying to complete the hacked toy. It had just refused to work this whole time. What was wrong? The schematics should work. Was it the battery, hardware, because it wasn't the programming Denny and I found out later. I am falling far behind.

1/28/2015 Day 11 of Mechatronics

Day 11 of Mechatronics

Today all I got done was my buzzer projects, but I spent the majority of my time hacking my toy which was a toy hummer and fully mechanical wound up toys. After trial and error, tinckering and engineering the toy was close to working and instructor Denny was going to took a look at it.

1/22/2015 Day 9 of Mechatronics

Day 9 of Mechatronics

Today I skipped the buzzer lab and went straight into what I remember to be a very important concept in programming (because of prior exposure to programming in C) the if- else statements. I used a TIP 120 transistor which has a different pin set up than the other transistors and after struggling to get the set up to work we (the instructor and I) had given up to make it work then it worked with magic or as my uncle would call it with MFM. Next, I went back to setting up a buzzer to turn on or off when I used a potentiometer at different resistances. Once that was done I set up to buzzer to activate with different ranging sounds for the fun of it and an LED to light up for fun (I didn't know it was a lab). From there I used a photo resistor to activate the buzzer for certain values in my program which came out to be very obnoxious after a lot of trial and error.

1/21/2015 Day 8 of Mechatronics

Day 8 of Mechatronics

Today I used a thermo resistor and a photo resistor to tell the "Arduino" to turn on an LED if the resistance reached a certain level by setting up two separate circuits, one for the LED and one for the particular resistor used. I tried to do the buzzer lab, but ran out of time.

1/20/2015 Day 7 of Mechatronics

Day 7 of Mechatronics

Today, after attempts to recreate the H - bridge set up, I was able to attach the set up to an "Arduino" to program the motor to change rotation every second without burning out the motor or the transistors each are either an NpN (negative posative negative) or a PnP (posative negative posative). This matters if the current will be strong enough to move the motor if the arduino activates or not. Thus, somewhat changing the course of the river we call electricity to turn the motor a certain direction.

2/03/2015 Day 13 of Mechatronics

Day 13 of Mechatronics

Today was my most productive day yet! I was able to learn how to program with the "Arduino" an ultra sonic sensor which uses a form of echolocation to measure the distance from speaker to object. Next, I learned the purpose and use of a phototransistor which measures light in order to act similarly to a photo- resistor but without the resistance. Lastly, I was able construct a flame detecting sensor using a phototransistor and a candle with some new program.

2/04/2015 Day 14 of Mechatronics

Day 14 of Mechatronics

Today I did not get much done. I toyed with my robot and hacked toy most of the class. Then took two attempts to make and program with the "Arduino" a working line sensor that apparently used too many wires. Nevertheless it was in fact sensitive enough to show a dramatic difference between white and black.