It was time for us to get some hands-on experience with building and making other interesting things. For this, we had the opportunity to go to the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab which is located near the South Quad in the building called Art Annex 2. This day was very different from the other days as today was when we started with the making process. The Fab Lab was a space with vastly modified products, for instance, a printer that could paint with water colors, electronic cutters, and fabric machines.

We were then split into three groups and hence were working on two different projects. My group was working on the electronics side of the project. Duncan and Andrea helped us in learning the working of LED lights on an Arduino board. An Arduino board is used to create sensors. “Arduino board designs use a variety of microprocessors and controllers. The boards are equipped with sets of digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards (shields) and other circuits. The boards feature serial communications interfaces, including Universal Serial Bus (USB) on some models, which are also used for loading programs from personal computers.” It was not that tough to use the Arduinos and therefore one can learn at home very easily. You can learn more about this on a website called ‘Instructables’. This is a website that tells you the step by step process of making an Arduino board yourself at home. There is a list of things that you would need to purchase to make this board which is also listed on the website.

As per our group, we are thinking of adding an electronic component in our product and that too a band that lights up due to certain reasons, so this was very helpful. The main purpose of the project that we were working on today was to make the LED lights blink based on the intensity of the light. The darker the light, the faster the LED lights would blink and the brighter the light the slower the LED blinks. There was a kind of a light sensor to which the board responded. By the end of the day, I could not believe that I actually made a circuit board that functions like a light sensor.