class2: sun tracker

This task is to build circuits to detect and follow the motion of flash light based on Arduino system.

Time is 1 hour.

The second class was successful in terms of making something work in such a short time. Brainstorming still started aiming at “perfect as expected” but the crucial thing was we only treated this process as an understanding of a big picture. One straight forward configuration was picked up without much more brainstorming. It’s not time to be too confident in our creativities so that spend much time on how to be cool.

Upon knowing only 1 hour was available, we all decided to lower expectation from 3D tracking of sunlight to only 2D. Then we quickly divided into small groups. A way of keeping helpful communication (not judged by amount) is ask question on input/output and interfaces of different groups.

Later on (about 25 min left), as guided by John, we found previous work in google, which was only able to track in-plane 1D motion of the light. Thanks to our unconfidence, we disassembled this design and switch to the model given online, which was not innovative at all but practical.

And always leave enough time for testing and trouble shooting, which is always ignored by saying “it will work as soon as we finish a few more steps.”

Three things I learned from first two classes are: Don’t be idealist , to google the problem before DIY and, to have an eye on interfaces.

Here is our device: It can detect the 1D motion of flashlight and rotate accordingly.

two senor on each side and a cardboard in between is to reduce the interference of the binary detection

We give credit to some online hackers of this idea and useful coding.