Monday, September 24, 2012

Sept 24-Analog Input

Introduction:
This week in lab, we were working on sending analog input for our Arduino. At first I was worried since we had so many issues learning how to do digital input, but surprisingly the analog went quite well. This lab covered using analog input with a potentiometer, a photo-resistor, a thermometer, and a force sensitive resistor (FSR).

Procedure:
My lab partner and I decided to start with the potentiometer. This required hooking up a basic circuit with an LED and running a code that caused the LED to blink. The potentiometer pin was set to change the speed in which the LED blinked based on how much resistance there was. Here's a video showing our results.

Next it was time to tackle using the photo-resistor. The photo resistor gives resistance based on the amount of light that it senses. Once again, it was connected to our basic LED circuit, allowing the LED to get brighter or dimmer based on the amount of light the resistor sensed. Here is a picture of our circuit when we were shining a light on the photo-resistor.


Using the thermometer was next. For this step, we simply plugged the thermometer into our Arduino and placed it in warm water. We tracked the temperature using the serial monitor window. We then removed it from the water and compared the temperatures.

Lastly, we used the FSR. This was connected to our LED circuit. The more pressure applied to the sensor, the brighter the LED was. 




Conclusion:
Overall I was happy with the lack of struggle that we had completing this lab. I finally feel like I'm getting the hang of circuitry and am beginning to get a better grasp on programming in C.

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