Week 8

Unlike the previous project, now I have a lot of parts that (hopefully) in the end will become a whole project.

So I decided to work on each part separately and then combine all of them together.

First part - "printing" a circuit

Because I want an organized circuit as possible and because I really want to use the milling machine I decided to create my own board. So I first started with planing my circuit. I want 4 different kind of buildings - 12 buildings in total. So for that I needed the analog inputs but the Arduino only have 8 analog inputs. I decided to use a MOSFET (which is like a switch) and connect it to the digital input.

Then with an help of a friend I created a circuit in a program called eagle.

in the middle of the milling process the tool broke so I will need to do it again. The lesson is to plan the circuit much wider and then to use a bigger tool

Part two- fabrication of the buildings

After I had the board sizes I knew each building's width. So I found a big piece of wood with the width I needed then I cut it to 12 blocks and then cut them to different heights. After I had my 12 blocks I sanded them a bit that they will be straight

So I got 12 different heights blocks

I wanted to create windows that will look like buildings. I'm not sure if I want to color them or use vinyl sticker on them but anyway I created the vinyl so I can use as a sticker or as a stencil for coloring

The only thing that is left in the building fabrication is to make a small crack for the resistor. So with the help of a hand saw:

I did small crack that the resistor can go in:

I'm planning to glue some kind of conductor material on the bottom of the building.

part 3: P5 programming

I continued to program from last week and add the options that if there is a building the sun and air lines will reduced

A situation were there isn't any building:

A situation were there are some building:

That was my original plan but now I think of adding a few thing like sound and volume

will change with every building added. And maybe instead of the grass disappearing I can draw buildings like in my vinyl cut file:

But is still depend on whether I'll finish everything on time.

Things left to do:

- Painting the buildings and gluing a conductor martial to the bottom

- Connecting the circuit

- Fabrication of the baes

Labs

So this week I didn't have most of the parts, so I order them. I tried to find a few in the ITP shop and luckily I found the Digital Potentiometer.

So until the other parts will arrive.. I started this lab

SPI Communication With A Digital Potentiometer

I started by connecting the board

then I attached the speaker to the Arduino and with resistor to the Digital Potentiometer.

After writing the code it didn't worked:(

I tried to debug it and notices that one wire was connected wrong so I change it. but unfortunately it still didn't work. I suspect that that there is a problem with the Potentiometer but I'll have to replace it to find out.