Discovering Arduino's Abilities

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 once. The same concept applies to resistors and voltage, where the bigger the resistor is the less voltage will flow through and the less resistance there is the more voltage can flow through. I learned that if you try running a really large amount of voltage through a small resistor it's possible for equipment (e.g. LED) to burn out and not work anymore, so it is important to know when to use a certain amount of resistance and with what equipment.

Taken From, Mr.Shappell's website
http://www.explainthatstuff.com/how-stepper-motors-work.html

While I was just beginning to learn about pulse width modulation Mr. Shappell saw what I was doing and decided to turn my ship in the direction of stepper motors instead. He told me it would be much easier and perhaps more interesting to learn about stepper motors first. He showed me this website with the name of explainthatstuff.com to show me how motors work and more specifically how stepper motors are different from other types of DC motors. The website starts off by talking about how important DC and AC motors are but how arbitrary they can become when trying to use for precise action like moving a robotic arm. This is where stepper motors "step" in because of how they are made, they are able to make precise movements that make them very useful. It's a thanks to the way they are built, which consists of magnets that are built with "teeth" like a gear and then move according to how an outer magnet is magnetized. As shown in the picture the outer magnet would always have polar opposites turned on opposite of each other and move in a clockwise or counter clockwise motion. This allows for the motor to move in either direction as many "teeth" as you would like.

Mr. Shappell told me that you could get even more precise than just moving every peg on a stepper motor, and this kind of baffled me because I didn't know what could possibly be more precise than moving each peg. Firstly, there was no explanation as to whether or not you could get more precise by using a stepper motor itself or by using another type of motors in the website he had originally showed me. So, as I was stuck for a bit not knowing what the answer was. This is when he quickly smiled and told that it was possible to move half a peg on a stepper motor. Surprised and eager to learn how he explained that by turning on two adjacent outer magnets inside the stepper motor you would end up with the inner magnet moving in between these two magnets and then to make it move the other half step you would turn off the first of these two outer magnets. So you would end up moving in half increments instead of whole increments. Doing this can prove to be useful when having to deal with extremely precise jobs such as carving something out using a 3D printer.

I truly learned a lot about the world of Arduino throughout these sessions. They all helped me get a hold of different concepts of Arduino. Thanks to Mr. Shappell and the Arduino tutorial series on Youtube I've been able to utilize my current research skills to their full potential and even learn a little bit more about researching. In this class I've always seen Mr. Shappell as more of a guide in the process of achieving my final goal but as proven through these occasion I've found out that if I want to learn something new I can use Mr. Shappell as a source of information, which is great because it means that he is multipurpose resource for me. This in turn also lead to me becoming a better communicator because I would only learn more about Arduino through Mr. Shappell if I made insightful questions and if I truly communicated whether or not I am understanding everything he is teaching me. I am not 100% certain if I will be utilizing all of the information I learned throughout these in my final product but I do know that by simply knowing and understanding these concepts it will enable me to make comfortable decisions on what I want my final product to be. Especially, because I find motors very cool and I would like to include motors (if necessary stepper motors) as part of achieving my final goal.