Week 2

This week our activity was based mostly in the workshop. 

Activity 1.

Programming the Arduino-

Luckily in our team Brenden has experience in electrical engineering so he was very helpful and was able to teach the rest of the team and help us understand what we had to do. After installing the program, codes were used in order to make particular things happen. 

After having initial difficulties with making 2 LED lights turn on we learnt a valuable trick. We were able to turn on the green LED with no troubles, but when it came to the red one we just couldn't get it to work. We came to the conclusion that it was broken. We were then informed that we had the positive and negative in the wrong spots.

Tips to differentiate positive and negative of an LED:

 Negative has a shorter pin than the positive side

Negative also has a flat edge on the side of the LED

Once we successfully had 2 lights working we were able to program them to flash

We then followed the instructions to install two push buttons. From here we were able to have the buttons to alter the speed and order of the two blinking lights. 

Activity 2. 

We had to each bring in some kind of device to deconstruct.
Within our group we had:
A torch
An old mobile phone
A playstation controller
and an Xbox controller

From these gadgets we had several different possible inputs and outputs to work with.

• Sound
• Light
• Push buttons
• Triggers
• Joysticks
• Vibration

I found the internal elements of the controllers to be very interesting. They were a very cool piece to bring along for the activity as they have so many different functions incorporated inside them. It was amazing to see what was actually inside them and what made them work. The phone was pretty interesting too, the screen especially. Deconstructed, you can hardly tell which piece is what. Everything was so tiny in the phone which made it a mission for Bek to pull apart. The torch was very simple inside. More so than I would have expected. There are not many parts required to make it work at all. 

What we achieved:
Using the deconstructed phone's battery we were able to activate the vibrating mechanism from one of the controllers!! 
This was very exciting!! It was great being able to connect two unrelated parts in a way that they were able to work together. This enforces the outlook to the main project in that as a group we will be able to put together something workable and very interesting. 





Possibilities:
We have the potential to use an element from each members deconstruction within a sequence. 
There is great opportunity to team together the controller triggers, the torch light, push buttons and the phone speaker.