Name: Yuru Chen

Instructor: Marcela Godoy

Interaction Lab 

4 March 2019

Partner: Julia

Exercise 1: Moisture Sensor

This sensor is used to detect the moisture in the surrounded environment. 

Since we don’t have a plant here so our group replaced the plant with a wet tissue, using this as a moist environment.

To make the sensor work, we first built the circuit. We connected the sensor to Arduino, and then added a LED to it, connecting it directly with Arduino. Here is the diagram of the moisture sensor. 

And then, we got a wet tissue. Surround the moisture sensor with the wet tissue. However, at the very beginning, we’ve encountered some problems–the LED didn’t light up. Later we found that it was because we didn’t surround the entire sensor with the wet tissue. Then we fixed this problem and the LED was lighted up. Below are the picture of our moisture sensor and the video of how it worked.

(optional) Exercise 2: Joystick

After the first exercise there were still some time so our group decided to start working on the second one, which is the Joystick. Here is the picture of our Joystick. 

Here is the diagram of how we connected the Joystick, breadboard and Arduino. 

At first the joystick didn’t work. We checked the circuit again and found out that the LED wasn’t connected to the Arduino.  After we fixed that problem, the Joystick worked–when we don’t push the button of Joystick, two LEDs appeared to have dim lights; when we push the Joystick left, the light of the green LED became lighter; when we push it right, the green LED stopped to  give out light. For the red LED, when we push it up, it stopped to give out light, when we push it down, it gave out stronger light. Here is the video of the circuit working.

Answers to the Questions:

 1. In the recitation I was intended to assemble a moisture sensor which can detect the humidity in the surrounding environment. If my sensor were to be used for a programatic purpose, I think the plant lovers will want to use this, because this device can detect the humidity in the soil, telling the plant lover when to water their plants. This is a very simple device. All you have to do is to insert the detector into the soil and read the data it shows. 

2. Code is always compared to following a recipe or tutorial because they are all something that instructional. For recipe and tutorial, they instruct people how to cook or how to do something. For code, it instructs the computers to do what we want them to do. 

3. With the develop of computers, it makes humans’ activities more and more convenient. It can help us store all kinds of informations, and all we need to do is click on the computer and find the data we need.