For the first week, I mainly tried to recognize different components which are new to me and open my world of physical computing with simple LED and button test. Though we don't have a soldered Arduino board, I tried batteries and Arduino Uno to play with the circuits. It is really interesting to have the HELLO WORLD experience when the first LED shines.

Components

Before preparing for the labs, I tried to recognize many components like regulators, DC power supply, resistors etc. Also, I realized lots of sensors and I'm excited to try most of them for my future projects. It's not easy to recognize all components at once especially the resistors. Except using multimeter, I find this website also useful to help me calculate the color code in the resistor.

Setting Up A Breadboard & Electronics

Before using breadboard, I used battery, resistor and led to consist a basic circuit. To know how to use multimeter, I also do the beep test to check the path and test the voltage of the battery.

Then I follow the circuit test to understand how breadboard are connected and how voltage regulator work to maintain constant voltage. To better understand how the currents flow in columns and rows in breadboard, I follow the LEDS in parallel test.

Then I tried to add button and resistors to make button-led test. For this lab, I tried to connect more LED in different ways to make them shine.

However, at this point, I realized the importance of using right resistors. We need to depend on the LED we are using to choose right resistors. Otherwise, the led won't shine. And, I still don't understand why for this example, I can only get one LED shine and the other one can't. The gif below show how the mistake happened...