Week 3 Lab: Electronics
In this week’s lab, we practiced using a multimeter to measure amps and voltage. It was also the first lab where we didn’t use the Arduino. Instead, our breadboard was powered by a wall wart.
A classmate taught me how to solder correctly; he likes to hold the soldering metal between the soldering wand and wire, and then drip the metal onto the joint. Here’s the finished product:
After I soldered this, I twisted the wires, and soldered the other ends to a header pin. I then hot glued the area around the header pin to form a secure connection, and reduce the stress on the wire.
Then I measured the voltage of different circuits– series and parallel, switch and potentiometer. I spent a good fifteen minutes growing increasingly frustrated because I couldn’t get any reading on the multimeter. A classmate then pointed out that I needed to remove the plastic covers on the tips (doh).
In the help session, I learned that when measuring anything, the multimeter needs to be set at a higher value. For example, if your LED is using 2.5 volts, the dial needs to be pointing at 20. If you have it set too low, then the meter will blink a seemingly random number, and then return to 1. Also it was hard for me to get the multimeter to respond when measuring the voltage of an LED when it was attached to a switch or potentiometer. I had to either press really hard against the legs of the LED, or wrap wire around the multimeter probes.
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on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Physical Computing.
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