Tag: solder

Week 4

I cannot believe how quickly this internship is going by!  The first month is already over!  June ended with a severe thunderstorm that left my apartment building without power from 11pm to noon the next day.  The weather certainly is a lot bigger here than in the Pacific Northwest.

Last week, I endeavored to play with my Arduino Uno some more.  I followed through the tutorials first.  This mostly consisted of hooking up LEDs and getting them to do different things (blink and so forth).  It doesn’t sound very exciting, but trust me, it is.  Here are some pictures from the tutorials:

1 LED and Arduino

This was with one LED hooked up. 

 

3 LEDs

These LEDs were flashing at different rates thanks to the program I wrote.

LED and Push Button

The culmination of the tutorials was to have the LED be controlled by a push button.

After I was feeling fairly confident about working with the tutorial, I moved on to the LCD Screen Kit, kindly provided by Amy.  I was able to get it all soldered together.  And I had it working with the program at first, but then something went wrong and I’m still working on getting it fixed.  It’s taking the input from the computer and garbling it, as you will see in the pictures.

LCD Screen Kit Parts

All the parts to be soldered together in the LCD Screen Kit.

Soldered back of the LCD Screen Kit.

Soldered back of the LCD Screen Kit.

LCD Screen Back

LCD Screen Back

LCD Screen Kit Front

LCD Screen Kit Front

LCD Message Garbled

LCD Message Garbled

There is a bit more work to do figuring out how to ungarble the message.  This week I’ll be turning my attention to RFID and NFC scanners and tags.

Week 3

I spent a lot of this week playing with my arduino kit and researching the things we might use with it.  I began compiling lists of shields that will attach to the arduino to add functioning.  I also looked up tutorials for putting together an LCD kit from Sparkfun.

In my researching, I found a pretty cool blog: Fashioning Tech.  It’s fun to go through the articles and see what interesting other people around the world have been doing with fashion and tech.  Some of the projects are really quite beautiful.  For instance, this article about lace that reads poetry is fascinating.

I think the highlight of the week was learning how to solder from Amy.  I’m going to be using it to put circuits and wiring together, but it’s one of those things that is just good to know for life.  (My dad is very excited that I can now help him with home repairs.)

Soldered Wire

My very first soldered wire.

This coming week, Michele will be back from her conferences in the UK and we will be sitting down on Monday to narrow my project down for the summer.  I’m really looking forward to hearing about everything she learned at the conferences!

© 2024 Kate Ringland, PhD

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑