Outcome

Outcome

• Practice exercise for learning to use button and potentiometer
• A simple device for the table: DND and okay to disturb signal using flex sensor, Switch and LED.

Process

• I had a hard time making any exercise work in the first go because of consistently dropping Wi-fi. But once that was fixed, it became much smoother work.
• We learnt the void blinkLED function in Lab Session 4 which I decided to try out in this assignment for blinking the LED. I decided to use this in the loop as a part of conditional logic and write code on my own based on what I think might be logical. This kept giving me an error that I was unable to resolve on my own.

Reflection

• The first time I was connecting, I had forgotten to use jumper wires to power the whole circuit. It's so easy to get caught up and excited about engaging with the input and output because of which I made multiple mistakes in setting up the circuit.
  
• Writing code on your own without an exact reference is hard. I wanted to make sure I'm getting the basics right instead of just copying code and it took me multiple trials and errors and multiple hours, despite which I couldn't get it right. Following is the code I couldn't get to work, hence I decided to design something different for exercise. If you spot my mistake and know how to fix it, please comment and let me know.  

• int flexPin = A0;

  int flexReading = 0;

  int ledPin = D2;

  int ledBrightness = 0;

  void setup() {

  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);

  Particle.variable("snoopy", flexReading );

  }

  void loop() {

  flexReading = analogRead(flexPin);

  ledBrightness = map(flexReading, 0, 4095, 0, 255);

  analogWrite(ledPin, ledBrightness);

  delay(100);

  }

Exercise 1: Controlling LED brightness with a Potentiometer

Exercise 2: Using Flex Sensor to indicate availability

Use Scenario

When I'm working on my desk in the studio, I often get disturbed by peers wanting to chat or ask a question. This sometimes breaks my flow of work and I would really appreciate a subtle way of communicating when is it okay for someone to disturb me and when it's an absolute DND. Therefore, I hope to design a phone holder that gives out warnings when I pick up the phone.

Input:

- Switch: turn the light system on/off

- Flex Sensor (FSR): sense the bend

Output:

- Switch: turn the light system on/off

- (when the flex sensor is bent halfway): low brightness of LED

- (when the flex sensor is all the way): high brightness of LED