Week 3 (In Lab) - Circuitry Lessons

Figure 1. A blinking LED circuit.

The team members spent this lab familiarizing themselves with the purchased materials, primarily the breadboard starter kit. The kit includes a small breadboard, wires, various resistors, an instructive booklet, a disc with pre-written code, and other useful implements such as transistors and relays.
While Michelle experimented with the aquarium pump and other mechanical parts, Parm and Le followed some lessons from the instructive booklet, which (in order attempted) were:

1. A very simple circuit that lights up an LED when a button is pressed. 
2. An expansion of the LED circuit, with 6 LEDs that fade on and off from right to left, as pictured in Figure 1. 
3. A circuit involving the relay, which was much more complicated and only half-successful in implementation, as the lab's time was coming to an end.

The breadboard was powered by our Arduino Uno, which was connected to a computer and running the pre-written code from the disc. Davina took this time to read through that code and learn how the Arduino syntax relates to physical results.