Dongni's Journal

While I was just finishing my microswitches I had in mind a problem, which had not been solved yet. I had no speaker to make my electronic keyboard work. Naturally, as I usually do when I have a problem I have no solution to I go to Mr. Shappel and ask him if he has any speakers laying around the I can use. Funnily enough, when I asked him he gave me an old stereo that was broken and he told me to take out the speakers from the stereo and use them for my project. The stereo was old and dusty so I had to take off a lot of dust before I could start cutting any wires. Eventually, I took out all of the speakers that the stereo had and I threw away the rest. Now my next problem was getting new wires that would connect from the speakers to the breadboard because the wires the speaker originally came with weren't suitable for connecting them to the breadboard. I discarded the wires that the speaker originally had and instead I got some new wires that I could connect to the breadboard an...

Soldering my own microswitches was an experience that I would never forget and that now lead to my next task, organizing them in a way that would resemble that of a piano and insuring that they don't move from that organized position. Originally I had the idea that I would put the microswitches onto a wooden platform that I would make to that the microswitches would look like they're on a miniature piano and so that the guts of the Arduino and all the wiring would be hidden. I thought this would be the best solution because it not only maintained the microswitches organized but made my project look cleaner and more professional. However, as I sat down with Mr. Shappel and spoke to him about this idea he proposed that instead, I should simply connect the microswitches with a wire that I would cut off from a coat hanger. It was much more simple and realistic than my idea because my original idea would lead me to learn how to use new tools and would require a lot of time that I di...