Week 1
In Class
In the first class, I felt intimidated. I had worked with Arduinos in 7th or 8th grade, but I knew very little about them, and I mostly followed instructions from 'Instructables' without much thought. The moment we are handed the component kit, there's a thrill of figuring out something new, but also a fear that I might not be able to keep up. But, anyway, as I go through the kit, so many memories from my childhood come flooding in, when I went to this small store in Thane City, to pick up resistors and diodes. I felt like a kid given the opportunity to explore electronic components again. That's how I took this class on, a playground for me, to play with more tangible interfaces.
Before I even knew it, the class was over, and I had made my first circuit, where the Arduino Nano was connected to a breadboard. I learnt how to supply 3.3V from the Nano’s +3V3 pin (physical pin 2) and ground from one of the ground pins.
I learnt some of these things before in my physics class at UW-Madison. However, I realised I could read the circuit diagrams, but I couldn't conceptualise how they might look on the breadboard. It felt like I had lost so much memory, but I'm getting reconnected to it now, which was an interesting experience indeed.
The class concluded with a fun activity where we explored the 4th floor, searching for objects and learning about how they interact with people. I was paired with Lin, we went around the floor, and then we found this artwork. It wasn't easy to understand. There was a camera in front of us and a scanning option, which led to this website. And you stand there wondering what's happening, and the point of the artwork is to confuse you, to make you think about interactions that humans have with objects, that a camera being there implies you're being photographed.
Assignments
The second lab was another one that started becoming challenging, as I realised my concepts were not quite clear. Instead of connecting the Arduino to the breadboard, I decided to power the breadboard without a microcontroller. To do that, I referred to the video, but I got really confused since I didn't know how to set up a DC barrel jack. When I went to the shop, I saw that there are two kinds of DC barrel jack, where a "male" connector usually has a pin or pins "sticking out" and the "female" connector is designed to receive those pins. I found the naming method quite sexist, and then while talking to Cathy, she mentioned that they are going to change the official naming soon, which I thought was long overdue.
Tess showed me how to connect the DC barrel jack. So, I used the DC barrel jack (female) and borrowed a screwdriver. Used a wire stripper to cut wires and made a circuit. I was able to make a circuit, but when it came to answering the questions, I was struggling. Then Nujum taught me how a breadboard works and walked me through the questions and answers, which clarified my concepts more, and then I used the concepts at the end to make a circuit with different styles of connections that lights up a breadboard.
The third lab was straightforward after understanding how to work with a breadboard. I was initially unable to light the LED in parallel, so Cathy helped me set up according to the lab instructions, and my friend Esteban, who majored in biomedical engineering in undergrad and now studies at Game Center, helped me set up a new circuit with a potentiometer.
While using the multimeter, I ran into issues while doing a continuity check because I didn't have one of my wires connected to the voltage section. Then Nujum helped me correctly connect the multimeter. However, it turns out that I had my multimeter in the diode checker setting, which I realised in class. I realised this because I asked a question about why my LEDs were lighting up, and Tom told me that it was probably in the diode check setting, so maybe I wasn’t doing a continuity check, but I was doing a diode check.
