We started today’s session with a really good informational presentation by Harris, a fellow Student. He guided us through all of his documentation and his final project which he produced last year for a similar module. It was very insightful to hear of the struggles he faced and how he managed to navigate them.
We then started drafting timelines for the entire project. This really helped to visualize where we are at with the current project and will prove useful with time management in the coming weeks.
As you can see the timeline is quite cluttered as there are lots of tasks to undertake. This is something that I will continually update as time goes on and jobs pop up.
For this session, we revised Creative Commons Licensing which is crucial to the software we will be utilising. A Creative Commons license is used by authors that intend for the general public to have access to their work, to edit it and potentially expand upon it. This can include a non-commercial license so it is for non-profit, individuals, or educational purposes.
The Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (cc BY-SA 3.0) license version allows users to share, copy and republish work in any format. It allows users the freedom to adapt the work provided, including any commercial uses that may be relevant. It is required that the original work is referenced properly and that it is not disguised as your own, independent work.
We then installed the Fritzing software and went about following the tutorial to create our very first circuit which features an Arduino Uno board, a LED and a resistor (220Ohm). We used the inspector fucntion to alter the resistance of the resistor and colour of the LED.
We then followed a more advanced tutorial featuring a 9V battery, a capacitor, a general IC (74C14), a photoresitor and a breadboard to create to following circuit.
Handmade Electronic Music by Nicolas Collins, Chapter 32 – “My First Oscillator”
The above circuit would assumably control the output of the device using the photoresistor, which is essentially the same design as my coursework from a previous module that functioned like a light theremin.
Fritzing is quite an intuative software that allows you to create circuits very quickly and has a very similar interface to TinkerCAD which I have worked with previously. You can implement the code that you would upload to the Arduino which helps with error checking and even goes much further with the schematic section which allows greater routing variety. Fritzing is very similar to TinkerCAD, with the exception that it cannot perform simulations. However, Fritzing provides a much greater variety of components that are not included in TinkerCAD.
