I had my second meeting with Professor Siek on October 6th and we discussed my progress. I was able to show her the code for my projects and also demonstrate how to set up my project that played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. On this project I had used some code that I found online for producing sound using the buzzer but I was a bit confused by how it was working, particularly its beep function. Professor Siek was also a bit confused at first but she was able to work her way through it and explain it to me. She then showed me a much simpler way to use the buzzer by using the tone function which produces different notes depending on the frequency that is given and I was then given a sheet that had all of the frequencies that I would need to create any note using the tone function.
After talking about last week’s work we talked about my next projects. Professor Siek had an interesting Arduino project in mind for me that would involve a sensor, a buzzer, and at least 4 LEDs in a row. She wanted the LEDs to gradually light up/turn off in order from one side to the other as the sensor’s reading increased/decreased and a buzzer to sound when all of the LEDs were lit up. She also wanted me to experiment with Tinkercad to create a 1” x 1” x 1” object to print using the 3-D printer and to create a design for the laser cutter using Adobe Illustrator. After discussing my assigned projects we concluded our meeting with a brief chat about how to share my work on my research blog using Google Drive for my Fritzing Diagrams and a repository on github.iu.edu for my code.
Projects:
The first project that I completed was the Arduino challenge. The hardest part about this project was the set-up as it was difficult to connect 5 LEDs, a sensor, and a buzzer to one board. Fortunately I have a special Arduino board that comes with 5 LEDs already connected and also a temperature sensor connected. However, I’d found that it was difficult to manipulate the values of the temperature sensor as I could usually get the value of the readings to increase by warming up the sensor with my hand, but I couldn’t easily get the values of the temperature readings to decrease. For this reason I decided to use the light sensor instead as it’s much easier to make the values of the readings increase or decrease by either uncovering or covering the sensor.
The set-up for this project was sort of tricky because this board already had all of the analog pins attached to sensors or lights so I had to disconnect a sensor from the board to open up a pin for the light sensor. After I was able to finally get the setup I completed the code which was very simple. The program starts with all of the lights off and then as the value read by the sensor changes between my predefined ranges then lights turn on and off in order accordingly. When the value of the sensor reaches 54 then all of my lights are on and the buzzer sounds. I was able to test my project by slowing raising and lowering my finger over the light sensor to gradually increase and decrease the light taken in by the sensor. As my finger would raise the sensor value would increase and the lights would gradually turn on and as my finger would lower the sensor values would decrease and the lights would gradually turn off so my project worked perfectly.
Tinkercad Jeep Keychain
This project was the most fun for me but at the same time it was a little frustrating and it took me a bit longer than I expected. I started this project off by completing all of the Tinkercad tutorials and doing a little bit of experimenting on my own. After some experimentation I decided that I would try to create a 1” x 1” x 1” Jeep Keychain.
While creating the Jeep I became a little frustrated because I frequently couldn’t find the views that I wanted and I couldn’t easily determine if my pieces were in the proper positions before I grouped them. I found it kind of disappointing that in Tinkercad your final creation could only have one color and that the original color of a piece would always change after you grouped it with the rest of the pieces. For example, I wanted to keep the letters of “Jeep” silver but I needed to group it to the rest of the black Jeep and after grouping everything the letters all turned black. This was kind of a minor thing, but I think my Jeep would have looked even sharper in the end if I could have used more than one color. I’m probably being overly critical of Tinkercad but that’s because I’ve used a much better 3-D design and modeling tool called Inventor. I used Inventor in high school in my engineering classes and it could do much more than Tinkercad and from my memory it was a lot easier to use too. I don’t think Tinkercad is nearly as bad as I’m making it out to be but at the same time I don’t think it’s the best 3-D design and modeling tool out there. In the end Tinkercad and my Jeep were okay, but I think they could have both been a little better.
Illustrator Laser Cutting IU Design
I decided to create an IU logo in Adobe Illustrator for my laser cutter project. I’d never used Illustrator before, but Professor Siek shared a slideshow with me that had instructions for how to use it with the laser cutter and I think I picked everything up pretty quickly. The main thing that I needed to know was to use red lines in my design where I wanted the laser to cut and black lines where I wanted it to engrave. This project wasn’t too difficult and I was happy with the end result.
