Coding and Putting it all together.

Looking back at this week’s class, I realized it was my last fab lab session! And it definitely was a bitter-sweet feeling. After having the opportunity to solder wires; work with laser printers, cutters, and engravers; I finally had the opportunity to try some coding and it was an unbelievable experience. At my internship this summer I had the opportunity to write VBA Macro’s as well as write some statistical programming code for R. However, I had never written Arduino before and it was truly a wonderful experience. We started with the basics of defining variables moved to writing loop statements and lastly IF then conditional statements. Through it all I was able to write a loop statement that was able to depict an SOS warning alert as well as combine Loop and IF Then statements to create my light sensor model. Here is a sample of what my code looked like:

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Here is a video of my final product:

This week was truly a special week in the fab lab because it was the week that we finally put everything together. It was amazing to be able to see a project from end to end and that’s exactly what we did. While, I unfortunately did not take a photo of my final product I was ultimately able to develop and code the light sensing programming for my Arduino Board. From there I was able to take the wires that I had soldered and completely wire my board. And Lastly, I was able to place inside the box I created from laser cutting and engraving last week to make an ultimate aesthetically appealing and self-expressing light sensor. This was amazing as I was able to gain 2 major take-aways:

 

  1. Seeing a project end to end is incredible and with anything in life if you are patient, diligent, persistent, and willing to have a positive attitude and comprehensive mindset there are no projects in life (whether it is business or non-business related) that are in cable of being accomplished.
  2. It really re-iterated the message of how vast and relentless the opportunities are for digital in the future. The fab lab gave me a very cursory view on digital through soldering, coding, and laser engraving and printing. However, this is only the beginning. There’s so much more to digital out there that I can’t wait to learn in the last seven weeks of the semester.

Have a great spring break everyone, and I can’t wait for what’s in store when we come back!

 

P.S. My favorite part was probably the coding but maybe that’s just my inner coding nerd channeling out J

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About Ben Chin

Hi! My name is Ben Chin and I am currently a senior studying Information Systems and Marketing at the University of Illinois. I have a huge passion for business analytics, business intelligence, AI, and will be doing technology consulting (like Veronika) full-time after graduation. Outside of that, I love sports especially basketball and I love working out and staying fit!

One thought on “Coding and Putting it all together.

  1. I love how you ended with the 2 take-aways. It really sums up your summary of the week as a whole. Coding was fun for me, as well. Generally, I prefer hardware over software but without coding, the applications of said hardware would be much more limited. It’s quite sad that this was our last week at the Fab Lab, but we sure gained some very fond memories from it.

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