Day 5: TechTop Workshop

Day 5 at Techtop Workshop

In the morning, I attended an Arduino Workshop with the Toy Design and Health & Living tracks in which I learned how to use the software and some of its coding syntax. I learned that an Arduino is a very easy to way to code something to do something. This was my first time learning and so I screwed up a bit. The code is very interesting and different from what I was used to, and it actually uses a lot of infinite loops!

To work on our temperature sensor and alert product, we received a wifi module called electric imp and calibrated it with the cloud. Inside of using an Arduino, it was more like using the wifi module to get input from the temperature sensor in the device and then using the agent code to go through the condition statement of the temperature and send the SMS. 

We also connected the temperature sensor to the wifi module on a breadboard to test it and used USB connection to hook it up with our laptops to code it in the cloud. 

I also went for a tour to the MechE machine shop and the EE department's many labs. They had a lot of cool equipment! 

Finally, we spent the rest of the afternoon/evening trying to learn Squirrel (the coding language for the electric imp to use the LM35 to get us the temperature of the room. LM35 actually has its output in bits (range of 65535), so we had to convert the bits into voltage (range of 0 to 3.3V). Then we had to convert the voltage into temperature (*100) all in our code. 

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/electric-imp-breakout-hookup-guide

http://smsgatewayhub.com/http-api

Next we will work on writing the code for sending the SMS via SMSGatewayHub.