Tuesday July 17, 2007
Last night a large number of TekBots workers volunteered their valuable time to helping Ellen Porter finish and repair 36 TekPets. I was among these students that worked until 3AM, I however was on a separate project, which was to create a TekBot kit counter for those workers creating kits for the coming up year. I was unable to finish the counter last night, and so decided to finish it today. Fairly shortly after arriving at TekBots today I finished preliminary software coding to get a base to build off of. After finishing the preliminary code I began once again on the hardware side of things, finishing up the soldering placing a startup switch and reset button. I next moved on to the hardest part of the project, which was calibrating the potentiometers to the most desirable resistance. This was something I was only able to guess at, and after finishing the programming I discovered I was terribly wrong with my settings. Via trial and error I recalibrated the settings and managed to get a working “prototype” which will be used tomorrow during the building of kits. Overall the project was a very fun and quick project and I’m glad I received the opportunity to work on it. I have made plans to further enhance the design and remove a few problems it has, but as of yet I need to go home and rest… cheers!
