Week #5

I am now at the end of my fifth week in my REU summer program and I am finally finished with my Arduino project.

Most of my time this week was geared toward sewing the lilypad parts onto my stuffed animal with conductive thread. I can honestly say that I have done more sewing in these past four days than I have my entire life! Though I had sewing machines at my disposal, I decided it would be easier to sew the parts on by hand because it is a stuffed animal. I have the main chip sewn onto the inside of the back of the stuffed animal’s shirt, the RGB LED is sewn on top of his head, buzzer on the inside of the front of his shirt, and I put the light sensor on his thigh because it needed to be exposed to read the light value.

I also spent I good chunk of my time designing a 3D wizard hat to be printed. The toughest part about this task was getting the thickness of the hat just right. If it was too thin the had would be very fragile but if it was too thick then the light would barely be seen on top of the animal’s head. After getting the thickness just right, I glued a layer of white cloth around the hat to make it look a bit more presentable.

This part of the project honestly took longer to accomplish than I had anticipated, it may be because of my subpar sewing skills. However, I finished and all the parts function the way they are supposed to. I am having one minor problem with the buzzer though. Sometimes the notes are off pitch, especially in the harry potter song. I don’t think my code is the problem because it was working perfectly when I used alligator clips. So I still have a bit of debugging to do but I would say that I am on track with the project.

This next week my main focus will be on creating video documentation of my project. Til next week’s blog! -John