July 7, 2015, Day 2:

Iulian Irimina and Phil Cook

Today we’ve built on prior’s day work and added new knowledge and skills to our foundation of building circuits. Our second day started with Jared’s presentation of potentiometers and capacitors after which he provided an overview of the exciting field of Mechatronics. Mechatronics uses elements from control theory, computer science, mechanical and electrical Engineering. After Jared’s lecture, we moved to the lab and shared solutions to the potentiometer problem posted a day before. Jared clarified the math aspect of the problem and answered our questions related to building the circuit on the breadboard. In the second half of the day, we’ve been introduced to the Basic Stamp microcontroller, a small computer about the size of a postage stamp that uses the PBasic programming language. During the lab, we wrote simple programs to get familiar with BS2 software and hardware. The exercises we completed in the lab underlined the importance of the BS2 variable types for writing future programs.

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