Dongni's Journal

Until recently I have simply been working on small projects that would help me get acquainted with Arduino, however, I didn't have a purpose outside of that for doing these projects. All of these projects I've done from debouncing to learning how potentiometers work have been very interesting and have truly taught me a lot about the world of electronics works. After a talk that Mr. Shappell gave to the entire class I realized how much a lot of what he said applied to me. He talked about how important it is for us to have a mission that we are attempting to achieve and that we need to get out of the cycle of experiential learning and begin to move in a certain direction. This lead me to choosing my final product and a mission that would maintain me interested in working with Arduino. Electing an actual final product took me a bit of time because I needed to find a product that would not only interest me but would also be feasible with the time and resources that I had availabl...

After learning about debouncing on Arduino the next tutorial the Arduino Youtube series had was about potentiometers. Potentiometers are these resistor knobs that are used to control the amount of voltage that goes through the circuit. You can either let not current pass through the potentiometer, let all the current pass through the potentiometer, or let anything in between those two values. For example if you have voltage of 5 that is flowing through a circuit and the potentiometer is closed half way then only half of that voltage will make through to the end of the circuit, the rest is released as heat. This is how we can control the volume of speakers and many other devices we use everyday. In order to help me visualize this simple yet confusing concept Mr. Shappell helped me by giving me an image of a pipe and letting water flow through it. The wider the pipe of water is the more water can flow through it at once, and the thinner the pipe is the less water can flow through at onc...