07: Electronic Input Devices

Lab July 19th, 2019:

Sensors

This week (July 14th-19th) we were introduced to the world of sensors also known as Electronic Input Devices. You can click below to view what we did this week:

Lecture

During this weeks lecture we were introduced to several different types of input devices. The most obvious of which were different types of sensors. First we were introduced to the primitive basics of electronics. This included learning about voltage and how to set up different types of circuits. After we were all comfortable with the foundational ideas we moved on to the different types of censors. Turns out there are a lot of different sensors out there. Some sensors we learned about include touch/motion, light, temperature, and magnetic sensors. We had a few demos that were mostly focused around capacitance sensors. One of the sensors demoed in class is what inspired the sensor I used for my assignment.

Lab

For this Thursday's lab we were tasked with creating a sensor that measures some type of physical quantity using an Arduino. I decided to make a version of the touch sensor we saw in class yesterday. My sensor consisted pf two copper foil pads. One pad was connected to the fifth input pin so that it could serve as an input for my monitor. Attached to this pad is a resistor to make the inout values more accurate and lessen interferance. On the other side attached to a ground pin is another copper foil pad. The closer the two pads got to each other the higher the spike created on the graph. Something that differentiates this sensor from the one in class is that it measures both proximity to the other pad and proximity to other objects as well. In order to demo my sensor I decided to use something called "tap code" in order to write a message using my graph. Can you figure out what it says? Here's a hint: This is usually the first line new programmers print. Click the button below to see the answer!

The answer is "Hello World"

I also attempted to read in the temperature at the lab using a very basic temperature sensor set up and some example code I found online. For some reason as soon as I attempted to upload the code to the Arduino I lost connection to the Uno and was unable to upload the code. I attempted to switch out the cables, but nothing seemed to work. Another thing I noticed was that when I did try to upload the code my Arduino got ridicuosly hot to the touch and the sensor itself also heated up. In the end I managed to get the program to work by tweaking the way my sensor was placed and which input pin it was attached to. It returned the degrees of the room in Celsius, but my results seemed inaccurate.