Week 6 was all about learning and making at the Champaign Urbana Community Fab lab. The Fab Lab does a tremendous job in inspiring interest and innovation among the members of the community. As I walked into the Fab lab, I was amazed to see how many different machines and materials they had for us to create almost anything we imagined. Jeff Gringer who is the Director of the Fab Lab even told us that the building was the second oldest on campus and it once had huge doors to let horse carts in!  I was particularly excited for this class as I was looking forward to learn how to use Arduinos and apply them to my teams final Project. After a brief introduction of the MakerSpace, our team was split up into 3 groups with each group working on a different skill. I was put into the team which had to design an Arduino circuit which detected light and powered LED’s based on the ambient light in the room. 2 Volunteers working at the Fab Lab provided us with a step by step guideline on how to wire the Arduino on a breadboard. After wiring up our circuit, we connected the Arduino to a Desktop and messed around with some C code to bring our circuit up and running.

It was a great experience working with Arduinos as I never really understood its power and application value. As our teams project is geared towards making Smart Homes more affordable, I positively believe that we can use Arduinos in the product we are designing. The next two weeks our team is going to work on the final project proposal and put the theory and skills we learnt into action.

** Check out hackster.io , its like a pinterest for cool projects mostly related to Arduinois which can be shared and done by anyone. It also provides detailed instructions and materials which can be easily purchased from their website. The Motion Sensor Water Gun was something I was checking out as I was going through their website.