The first Interlab recitation is really exciting. We learned soldering and manipulating electric units.
1. Soldering
Although I’ve soldered before for my robots, there are always something new to learn for me. Before I just tried solder without any professionality. This time I learned the precise step of soldering. During the soldering, I also found some tricks: for example, if I failed to solder two parts directly, I can just use the solder on the iron and plaster them onto the connecting points.
The Button I soldered
1. Making circuits
We made 3 circuits: A speaker; an LED; and a dimmed LED. Unlike many who had trouble with the circuit graph, the most difficult part for me is to use breadboard properly. Even if I learned at class how the wires are connected under the board, I made mistakes during use. For many time I plug in the units horizontally on the board.
The speaker I made
The LED I made
After the recitation I asked my professor Rudi the function of the capacitor, as I didn’t understand why we use it there. Then I learned it is to filter out other voltage to make the power a stable voltage and it must be used to together with the voltage regulator. But I still don’t know how the voltage regulator works and I would like to learn more about it in thte future.
Connection to the reading:
The article offers a model for Interactivity: two actors, each can send, process, and receive information and the operate the process with each other.
For the circuits: we press the button and send the information, the circuits receives it, “process it” and turn on the light/make sounds, then we receive those signals. It ends there. We don’t need to process the information and react. Also, as the author gives an example of that tree branch, It made me wonder the lifeless and unsmart circuit might not be a strong actor itself. So I designed the following model to make the circuit interactive:
We are on a ship, on some ocean and we don’t have phones due to some reason (whether it’s sun storm or we are in 18th century). We found there is a ship not far away on our side and we need to communicate with it (for making sure it’s not enemy or asking for help whatever). We take out our circuits and send out Morse code either by flashing the LED on voice the speaker (well, that should have more power of course). People on the other side received the information, take out their circuits and send the response. Then we talk.
well, that’s interactivity.