Etec 597: Makerspaces

Here's to the start of Etec 597: Makerspaces through Texas A&M-Commerce.

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Week 5: Relays

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This week I completed activity 11: relays. I have worked with motors and servos before, so I skipped those chapters, and relays were the first topic I have no experience with. I learned that a relay works like a physical switch, similar to the buttons and transistors. The added benefit of a relay is that it is able to handle much higher voltages and currents. For instance, we can turn the arduino port on and off like a switch, but the arduino can only produce up to 5.0 Volts. The Relay allows for the low voltage arduino to control a gate for a high voltage/current source, such as a wall outlet. I did not end up going this far in the project, but it is nice to know that an arduino could be used to control higher powered devices. Part 1: Tutorial During this portion I constructed the circuit from the provided example. I ran into two main challenges during this portion. The first challenge is that the relay in my kit was not designed for a breadboard as the legs did not align with the...
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Week 6: Locking Safe

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My goal for this project was to create a locking safe. The safe would be locked and would only unlock if the correct code is put into the safe. I also wanted to include a Master/Override code that would allow a consumer to set their own Access Code for the Safe. Here is my Video of the Safe Working. This Safe took a bunch of coding and I really enjoyed the challenge. The past six years all of my coding challenges have been in the role of teaching students, and after awhile their codes become rudimentary and repetitive. Even my most advanced students only scratch the surface with the robotics that we do in my classes. (As a side note, next Spring (2019) I have been given the green light to teach a whole coding class to my students. I am quite excited to expand our exposure with computer programming). Below is a video of me walking through the code.  Now that you've seen the final products. Here is the journey of how I got there. First I wanted to do a completely ...
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Project 2: Copcar Lights

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During this week's lessons we experimented with the potentiometer. I started with the example code provided and then I rewrote the entire code with different names for the variables, just to check if I could follow what information was being used and where it was needed in the code. Reflection: One of the more humbling points was after I successfully rewrote the code I showed my wife. She thought it was pretty cool as she is always very supportive. I then attempted to complete one of the circuit play activities to get both devices to run through the digital ports. During this portion I wanted to dive in a little deeper and I discovered the print.read command, I documented this process in my previous post. It took me about two hours to fix and debug this activity, after which point I showed my wife again. It then dawned on me that from her perspective I had done pretty much nothing, the LED still flashed the same as before, but I knew that I had made great strides in my personal u...
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