Assignment 1:Wiring an LED with a switch, wiring several LEDs in series- Jan 27,2004

I got past the soldering of the connectors, and the switch, and wiring the board was fun after I understood the logic of it.And it worked great with a single LED & resistor.

What isn't so clear to me is lighting them up in series and parallel.I guess I'll get my concepts clear on that first.Also it was a handicap to work without my own stuff, which has yet to arrive from Jameco.I managed this assignment by borrowing the board & some other stuff from Todd, and miscellaneous other stuff from classmates!!

 Assignment: Digital Input & output: Feb 18, 2004

This assignment was fun to do.Initially it was hard trying to decipher the schematic diagrams & wiring to the PIC etc, but one gets the hang of it. I also realised there is great beauty in a neatly wired board : clutter-free & easy to read.

So I wired the board, programmed my chip, but nothing, the LEDs stayed off. I checked to see if the board was getting power ( Todd suggested this way to check if the board is getting power: Wire up from the vertical sides of the board in this sequence: power>>LED >>resistor >>ground or as with the other circuits, power>>resistor>> LED>>ground ) Well, the LED lights up, so the power scene is good.I next reprogram the chip, still nothing. After checking things over & over, I realised (thanks to Michael) that it was a small issue of my resistor going from the MasterCLR pin on the chip to ground instead of to power.Once that was corrected, all was well.

Next i tried connecting a switch & seeing the output.Very exciting.

Lessons learnt: What makes a complete circuit; reading schematic diagrams.

Analog Input-Output + Tech Research:

We have combined this assignment with our Tech Research project about the Sonar sensor.Read more here.

Serial Output: (March 1):

First, I wired my board so that I had a digital input defined (port b) and serial in & out were set to port c. The output I got in HyperTerminal was a string of zeros.(?).Also, the output in HyperTerminal did not respond to my turning the digital switch on or off.(?)

Next,I wired the pot to the analog input points at port a. I got a beautiful series of numbers, that responded to the switch being turned.The one problem I faced here was that one part of the code worked great, but not the other.Why?

Attaching an LED to my serial output pin did not work either!!

At this point, I discovered that my voltage regulator was burning hot.Could that be the reason for things not working? Also, the regulator heating up so much,what does it mean: a capacitor needed to be added, the regulator was bad, or something else?

After 6 hours of struggling with these, I didn't get to work on the Luv-O-meter exercise.

So it would seem, this session was more questions and fewer solutions !!

Mid-term project:

My midterm project was conceived around the concept of media wars being played out in our world today. I chose to show this through the interface of the Chinese Checkers board game. Each player represented one of the media giants, and all of them would strive to win the game, following the rules of Chinese Checkers.

Tom Igoe suggested we actually play a game to understand the dynamics better, and so we did. We realised a couple of things that were not too apparent when i was thinking about the project conceptually:

1. The game can get so engrossing, and the need to win necessitates such concentration on planning the next move, that it was unlikely that the players would ever look up to watch the Director movie being played out on the screen. No harm there though, the audience could watch the changes initiated by each move of the players.

2. The game was complex enough with two players; with all six playing, the level of complexity to be woven in multiplied manifold. Also, while this game needed meditating on each move, it is unlikely that the degree of reflection and therefore time taken for each move was more than a few seconds. Such rapid-fire moves would need to be orchestrated in the Director movie so that the story was just one huge blur of images coming and going.

More about my MidTerm project here.

Final project:

My final project is titled 'Window to the world', and is about the little opening that big media allow us to glimpse at events around us, the way they wish us to see things. And while it is true that the web has resulted in a lot of smaller groups and individuals too providing a more accurate, grass-roots picture, the enormous pervasiveness and ubiquity and ease-of-use ( just switch on the TV) of accessing these sources make them formidable for the smaller player.

Go to Final project.

Thoughts of work-in-progress are here.