Hello my name is Jahmac S, and I am a rising junior at Uncommon Charter High School. I’ve always been interested in engineering because it allows a lot of room for creativity and there is always something new to learn. I joined Bluestamp because I want to learn coding and basics of mechanical and electrical engineering to implement ideas from a very diverse set of people at the program.
Final Documentation
For my second milestone I have created a PCB that has three buttons which includes a button for stopping the music pausing, and resuming the music. For my next modification I am planning on adding buttons that allow you to select what songs you want to hear, and a potential meter that controls the volume of the music. a challenge I faced was coding the arduino to pause and stop the music.
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First Milestone
For my main project I Created a Mp3 player. the things I used to create it were an arduino UNO, a mp3 player shield, and a 32 GB micro SD card. the tutorial I used was from Sparkfun(https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/mp3-player-shield-hookup). and the code I downloaded from GitHub(https://github.com/madsci1016/Sparkfun-MP3-Player-Shield-Arduino-Library).
The way it works is when the music is put onto the micro SD card and the card is put onto the mp3 player shield, the mp3 player shield reads the data on the micro SD card and sends the music file to the arduino. The arduino then, based on the code written, takes the music from the mp3 player shield and allows for a bunch of different commands. In this case the commands are the ability to select a song based on its track number, pause and play music with a single one letter command, stop the song completely when finished, and more. the music is then emitted from the speaker using the sparkfun audio amplifier.
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Starter Project
For my starter project I created a minty boost which is a charging kit that allows you to charge your phone, iPod etc. It basically uses two AA batteries which gives a combined voltage of 3 V. A step-up DC/DC converter chip, a capacitor and an inductor is used to form a boost converter circuit. These three components work together to convert the 3 volt produced by the two batteries into the 5 volt needed to charge the device. The way it works is that the chip acts as a switch that constantly turns on and off. When the switch is closed the current from the battery flows only through the inductor, but when the switch is opened the energy stored in the inductor adds to the current that flows through the diode. The diode prevents the current from going back to the inductor. After it passes through the diode it charges the capacitor. The energy stored in the capacitor is released to the load when the switch is closed. This process is repeated until a constant 5 volt is maintained at the output.
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