Maroula Bacharidou

1. Assignment

This week's assignment was to measure something by adding a sensor to a microcontroller board that we have designed and read it. Although I was curious about the different types of sensors that we saw in class, I realized that none of them was relative to the kind of "sensing" that my final project would require. So, I saw this week as a good opportunity to develop my own experimental input device and make an important update to my final project! This device was a set of conductive pads that I would need to embed on the external surfaces of my building blocks in order to make them communicate and exchange data, voltage and current. When I made my sensor work, I found some time to work with an IR sensor to remotely switch on and off the LED of the board that I designed back in week 4. It was interesting that I used the same board design for both of the exercises I made this week.

Figure 1. Sending signals to the IR sensor and flashing the LED.

Video 2. Making my own, experimental, surface-touch sensor.

2. Using an IR sensor

Figure 1. Programming my board in Arduino.

3. Making my own (experimental) input device

The details for this exercise can be found at the update 3 section of my project updates. I spent most of my time this week working on this update, and it proved extremely helpful for the development of my final project.