This past week’s class marked our third and final session in Champaign-Urbana’s Fab Lab. After completing the embroidery and laser-cutting workshops previously, I was lucky enough to have the Arduino workshop as my last rotation. Funnily enough, this workshop was the most relevant to my semester project since it requires the use of an Arduino.

At first, I was extremely excited to assemble an Arduino! However, this feeling of excitement quickly dissipated as soon as this was handed to me:

The kit made me extremely nervous! It looked quite complicated. Luckily, one of my friends provided me with the guidance I needed in order to assemble the Arduino. To my surprise, It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would have been. In fact, I became fascinated by the whole functionality of the Arduino. From a software perspective, I thought it was really cool how minor changes in the the programming language amounted in changes to the Arduino itself. For example, if I increased the delay on a line of code and re-uploaded it, the Arduino would take on these changes. Check it out below!

All in all, I really enjoyed this past week’s session at the Fab Lab! It drove my interest in coding by a great deal. Going forward, I hope to use this newfound knowledge and fascination towards my semester project. After this workshop, my group members and I have a better idea as to how to go about bringing it to life.