Overview
This week we devoted all of our time to working on our prototypes. Now that my team has become familiar with Arduinos, Perfboards, Ohm resistors, and the wiring, we were able to begin getting everything connected. Unfortunately, our 7-Segment Display still has not come in, but we still began connecting our Arduino with the Perfboard.
Connecting the Wires
We followed along with some online tutorials on how to connect our wires (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc9Yw5kgTTM). This tutorial is in Hindi, so we were not able to understand exactly what the narrator is saying, but we were able to follow along with his visuals. First, we downloaded the code to our Arduino, then we connected the wires. In order to fully comprehend what we were building, we tried to really understand each wire and why it was connecting to its designated port. We utilized 7 LED lights to substitute for our 7-Segment Display for this week. This makes sense because each of the segments in the 7-Segment Display are essentially an individual LED light. Thus, we decided to utilize individual LED lights for now to see if we could get them to light up.
After connecting everything, we plugged the prototype into power and began pushing the push button. The result: WE GOT SOME OF THE LED’S TO LIGHT UP AS WE PUSHED THE BUTTON! We could not make much sense of these lights since they were not technically arranged in the manner of a 7-Segment Display, but we were really excited to see some results from our work. Check out our connected prototype below with an LED lit up:
As evident in the picture above, a challenge we had with our prototype was the exposure of the wires/Ohm resistors. We solved this potential issue by individually wrapping the exposed wires with an insulating tape. This helped us ensure that none of exposed wires would touch one another and thus cause issues. Check out our final prototype from today below:
Prototype with Insulating Tape
Ohm Resistors
A challenge that we faced was not having the exact Ohm resistors for our prototype. We needed 470 Ohm resistors, but we only had 170 and 280’s. Through some research, we found that we could simply connect the ohm resistors together and add their numbers to get closer to our ideal number. Thus, we connected one 170 to one 280 Ohm resistor to get a final resistor of 450 Ohms. We figured that the 450 Ohm resistor would suffice in place of the proposed 470 Ohm resistor. Additionally, here is a useful article for anyone who wants to know how to read the resistor color codes: http://www.resistorguide.com/resistor-color-code/.
Moving forward
We are really hoping that our 7-Segment Display comes in next week so we can be ready to begin the testing stage (keep your fingers crossed for us!). Thank you for taking the time to read my post.
-Scott Provenzano
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