Hi my name is Alexander and I am incoming Junior at Menlo Atherton High School. My two projects are a MintyBoost for my starter project and for my main project I am making a Hand Gesture Bracelet. The experience at blue stamp was good because I met new people and I a lot about coding and engineering.
Final
I am back with my final project the hand gesture bracelet. What i have added to the hand gesture bracelet is I have added the rest of the flex sensors to the glove by using a breadboard that I connected to the Arduino with wires. After I got the all the flex sensor up and running I sewed all the flex sensors to the glove. When I was sewing it was a pain because I had to make sure I did not sew both sides together and to resew one of the flex sensors back because I had sewed both sides of the glove together so I had to unstitch the flex sensor and resew. After I sewed all of the flex sensors on to the glove, I soldered the 5 volts wires to a longer wire. The 22k resistor that was soldered to the wire one of leads of the 22k resistor was used for ground so I soldered all of them to a longer wire and connected it to ground, and the other lead of the 22k resistors were soldered on to different wires and connected to the analog pins. When I finally finished the flex sensor glove I started on get one of the RGB Leds working I did by getting the led and I connected it to the breadboard which is connected to 5 volts and ground. When I got the led connected the breadboard I used three 270 ohms resistor and I connected them to the three color cathode and I used three wires and connected them to the three cathode with the 270 ohms resistor to connect the three wires to the digital pins on the arduino. I used the code I downloaded to the arduino libraries to get the Led to light up and fade to a different color. After getting my first Led working I did the same to the rest of the Leds. Some of the challenges I had while working on this was getting the code of the leds because the code on the website had to many comments and code mixed together so it was hard to distinguish the code but with the help of Max I was able to import a code already made to my library. Another trouble was I had to rewrite the whole code for the flex sensors to change the color on the leds because I had accidently forgot to save the code. My next steps is to shorten the wires, get the leds into the bracelet, add a switch to the bracelet so I can turn it on and off, and get it connected to a 9 volt battery.
Milestone 1
For my main project I am making a hand gesture bracelet. The first thing for the project is getting a flex sensor hooked up and connected to the arduino. A flex sensor is basically a passive resistive devices that can be used to detect bending or flexing. The arduino is collecting data from the flex sensor from one of its leads. The data the arduino is getting from the flex sensor is analog signal data. My 1st problem was understanding the code for the flex sensor. My 2nd problem was understanding the difference between analog signal and digital signal. My final problem was keeping the 22k resistor soldered to the wire because the 22k resistor kept snapping off the wire.
Starter project
I created a MintyBoost for my starter project. A MintyBoost is a portable charger. While building the minty boost I came across problems like I accidentally soldered holes that weren’t supposed to be soldered, which took time to de-solder, and I had to reconnect the battery pack wires to the circuit board. But I figured out those problems and got passed them. On the other hand, one of the most important parts of the project is the power inductor, which helps store and convert voltages from low to high. The electrolytic capacitors, diode, and the USB port are other parts. The electrolytic capacitors help smooth the input and output voltages. The diodes have a special property that current can only pass thru them in one direction. The USB port is the connector that is on a computer, and nearly all USB charging cables will plug into it. The most important part is the boost convert chip which helps the projected convert volts into energy. The minty boost runs on two AA batteries that are connected to the circuit board. The thing I learned was to solder and that parts need to go in a specific way to let the thing work.
