Process

In designing this little device, my first problem I encountered was the mess of wiring I had after learning to use a photovoltaic sensor. It drove me crazy enough that I rewired the whole thing to a similar layout, but one that made more sense to me. The next was in writing the code to control the output of the timer. My program creates an event on the Particle Dashboard when the button is pressed a second time to inform the user of the total time spent reading for that session/chapter. I kept getting some weird readings and had used the light to trouble shoot what was going on. I noticed the light would only stay lit sometimes and eventually realized I needed a short delay to allow the user to remove their finger, so as to not re-trigger the button press on accident. I made use of some time functions to help track the difference in time between button presses and output readings as strings.

From there my next challenge was finding an appropriate range for the photovoltaic sensor. It is rather finnicky and I used the output of the Brightness variable I created to understand what readings I was getting from the sensor. I used a pen cap to create a darker environment for the sensor, but still came to find that it was sensing a large amount of light anyways. Once I mapped the sensor and brightness values appropriately, I reset the brightness variable to what it should actually be tracking. Nonetheless, I came to find the sensor still on the fritz when I moved the board to a new location to record. Setting it up on the laptop, close to where it was before, allowed me to fix the issue.