I was doing well in the past two labs, but started to struggle again with this one. Floor resources are low and I wasn’t able to locate some of the materials. I did my best to follow along, but I also feel the concepts behind transistors (NPN, PNP, MOSFET, etc) are quite complex and I haven’t fully absorbed them. I will definitely be asking them during class today.
Adding a potentiometer
Adding a transistor. They ran out of TIP120, so I used the TIP 102 as a placeholder just so I could practicing wiring everything.
It works with a DC motor! The blurry blue is a piece of masking tape spinning.
It does not work with a gear motor… Is it because I have the wrong transistor? I wonder if it’s because the gear motor I borrowed from the shop didn’t have wires attached and I didn’t install them correctly.
I wasn’t able to do the portion with a DC incadescent bulb because I wasn’t able to find one on the floor. I hope to try the last part of the transistor lab once I find one. This is definitely a lab I want to revisit again in the future, especially if I’m going to work with motors.
Next, to start on the second lab, I soldered header pins to my motor driver from my arduino kit. They were a bit globby, I noticed soldering this time felt more challenging than connecting two wires together because I had to be more precise in placement. I accidentally soldered two pins together, so I had to practice desoldering as well.
After soldering the motor driver, I plugged it into my breadboard and started working on the connections. There were a lot of cables and connections for the motor driver.
Attempt 1 with additional DC power supply attached. I used a gear motor with this set up (gear motor not pictured).
Attempt 2 with additional DC power supply attached. I used a regular DC motor with this set up.
This time, the motor wouldn’t respond… thus I was unable to test out the code to control the motor. I feel like the code itself is pretty straightforward, I think I’d need some assistance troubleshooting the circuit building component.