This week we learned about electronic output devices. As you can imagine this lecture was very similar to the week seven lecture about input devices, only about outputs... Because of these similarities I decided to make this week's assignment a sort of "revamp" of my week seven assignment. After being introduced to several output devices such as different types of motors including stepper and DC motors, LED light strips, and several others I was the most interested in the buzzers. This itself surprised me because they initially seemed so obnoxious and annoying, but they seemed perfect for what I was thinking of doing. The first thing I tried during lab was to make a buzzer that sounded when a button was pushed. This had okay results, but the button was a little faulty and the buzzer would sound for a while after I stopped pressing the button. After this slight failure I had the idea to recreate my input sensor from week seven, but also include the buzzer as an output. I remade my touch sensor and then wired in my buzzer. Next I created a new coding program based off two programs I already had, the buzzer example and my week seven program. I mashed these two together and managed to create a program that made a buzzer sound when I touched my sensor. This actually had pretty good results. The only slight flaw I noticed is that when the touch sensor is pressed for a while the graph shows a small fluctuation on the plateaued line. Other than that I was really happy with the results I got. Another reason I really enjoyed this week is because I realized how handy are websites can be. When I was recreating my touch sensor all I had to do was go to my documentation for week seven on my website, and all the steps I needed were already there. It really taught me how valuable good documentation actually is.
This is the original push button:
This is what the final touch sensor looked like:
