W14

SPRING BREAK!!!

Because we had planned to design and test the circuit over break, Wynnie made sure to take the circuit equipment home. This included the two pieces of plywood, various amounts of wires, two load cells, load cell amplifier module, and an arduino nano. 

Originally I had planned to follow a tutorial we had found on youtube. It was perfect because it had exactly what we wanted.  Which was a fairly simple and user friendly circuit that recorded the weights. We were planning to modify the shape of it so it would attach to our blocks better. I spent the time to build the circuit and followed the diagram in the video; however,  when I went to retieve the code, it could not be found. Even after multiple attempts I could not retieve it from the link

Due to the fact that our original plan did not work, I spent some time researching sensors that were very similar to the one we had planned on using originally.  I found one that I believed would work and built the circuit. I uploaded the code into Arduino and ran across a couple of errors. I needed to add the load cell amplifier into my arduino library, and once that was done there were no errors. I went to plug the circuit into my computer using a different cord and ran into another error. After some googling I discovered that the cord could not transfer the code over to the circuit. I tried to use the blue cord given but my computer does not have a USB port. Luckily, I have a USB to USB-C adapter. I tried using that, but the code still would not upload to the circuit.

After much more trial and error, I switched over to my chromebook. My chromebook does have a USB port, but when I tried to download the arduino software, it was blocked. 

Even though I had wanted to achieve more over break, I got a lot of trial and error out which is all part of the testing phase of the design process. O had to redesign the circuit until I found something that worked.