Recitation 2 : Johnny

  The process of building a circuit is far more interesting and difficult than I thought. At first, I have no idea what to build first and what next. Looking at the picture of real objects rather than the circuit diagram makes me confused about how the electricity flows through these circuits and makes the whole device work. But the process of figuring out how the connection works is also interesting. I spend lots of time investigating why the buzzer will be triggered once one side first taps the arcade button for 20 times.

  ( Btw, I have never been defeated in this game, please call me APM king)

Now I am going to answer the 3 questions.

A to Q1

  For me, I think I use technology mainly as a tool in my ordinary life, as well as the circuits I built. For example, I built the circuit 3 for pursuing competition among others and gaining a sense of pleasure as well as friendship. Using technology is only a way to do so. That is to say, I use it as a tool to pursue other things like money, emotion, and so on. Similarly, when I use the computer, which I think is the most important technology development in my daily life, I will use it to do tons of things like writing docs, playing games, and beautifying pictures. I do these things not only I want to do them, but also have other motivations behind them. I use the computer to write docs because I want to express my idea to others and convey them to agree with me. I play games because I want to find pure joy contained in it, regardless of how terrible the real-life could be. I beautify the pictures because I think their real beauty is beyond my techniques of taking photographs. In either way, I use technology as a tool to serve other purposes.

  Like I mentioned before in another blog, I want to define interaction as an event which two or more sides are involved in and each side can sense others’ movements or changes and then form its response accordingly so that the whole incident will be looked different from a third party perspective. In the circuit’s case, I, the user, as one side involved in the event, interact with the circuit by deciding whether to turn on or turn off the arcade button. Vice versa, the circuit itself interacts with me by giving the response of whether the light is on or off according to the user’s decision.

A to Q2

  In that branch, which is connected to the pin 11 and 10, the resistor is the only thing that stands between the 5v input and the ground. To protect the power from burning, we need a resistor that can block the flow of electricity better than the 220-ohm resistor does. So here we choose the 10k resistor to keep the whole circuit from damage.

A to Q3

  If I have 100,000 LEDs of any brightness and color at my disposal, I want to build a device that can give brightness to those areas’ lack of sunshine. To be more explicit is to build an artificial sun. I know it sounds like a boring design, but at least, I think it’s a romantic and practical design. Personally speaking, I enjoy the feeling of basking in the sun. So I prefer sunny days to rainy ones. Only realizing the fact that I can see the sun will cheer me up and keeps me motivated during the day. I believe many people living in high latitude shares a similar emotion to me. Every year, we can see lots of visitors from Northern Europe travel to the southern part of Europe for taking sunbaths. So I want to build such a device which can cheer people up as well as giving farming plants one more round of growing periods.