Hello! It’s Thursday again, so time to recap the past week! Last week ended up being a 3-day work week, and we had Thursady & Friday off for the 4th of July weekend.  It was a good break and an amazing rest! After that we went straight back into protyping and coding and coding and coding. And electronics. And more coding to fix the coding that previously had problems,creating a code with even more problems.

I left off last blog post with Wednesday, about to go to a Houston Dynamos soccer game with the rest of the SEED gang.  It really was quite a good game, and was followed by a small fireworks extravagansa.  I went back home and filled the rest of my long weekend with sleep, meeting friends, a pool party, visiting the Houston Zoo and seeing the City of Houston fireworks. As I come from a smaller area of the country, I hadn’t seen that many big fireworks and so was very suprised as the shows went on at both the Dynamos game and Herman Park.

But all good rests come to an end, and our rest came to an end on Sunday, where we had an “optional” prototyping day. As I had just created the wiring for our project, I was raring all weekend to continue to work on it, to the extent of almost walking to Rice just so that I could on Saturday night.  Over this week I haven’t worked on many different things, but learned some new skills and became my team’s code guru.

For learning, I learned how to solder, even soldering in a limit switch for our device.  I also learned how to 3D print with multiple types of filaments in the same job, a skill that I see becoming very useful in my career as more and more things are being done with 3D printing. I also learned C++ so that I could work on the Arduino, a language that I have very very little experience with.  I actually spent most of my hours creating our team’s code from scratch,  as the previous team did not leave a good arduino code.

I think the coding was difficult as I faced many challenges, especially creating safety procedures for the medical device and in controlling the motor accurately. Actually towards the end of yesterday we figured out that the amperage that we were supplying the motor was insufficient, so I had to greatly edit the code. Before this the motor had been drifting, never returning to the same place in rotations, so I had created a system to try and make the motor more accurate using the limit switch.  The finding of the amperage problem greatly changed my code procedures, but I believe it is fixed with what I did today.

At this point the Stepper motor is fully functional, and when we put it in the previous team’s device it functioned exceptionally.  Now we will look to seeing if the motor compresses the BVM enough to fufill the largest compression, the compression on the “Adult” setting.  Once we are sure that the rotational distance is exactly right through this, we can make sure that the device delivers the correct breaths per minute on each setting.

I don’t have many pictures of the device right now, and I don’t think looking though 14 pages of code would be fun, so I’ll try and include a video of our functioning device next week. But for this week, I got a relaxing break, followed by stressful coding.  But I can see that I followed through with work this week, as for most of it I was in the computer lab with no one making sure that I was doing my work like what happens with all the previous jobs in my life.  I like the feeling of working on a deliverable and using my most efficient process to get there, and the trust that my team members had for me to do it.  Even with not knowing what problems made the code break the way that it did, trying to learn a coding language, having something working only to break it again, I’m proud of this week. After all, “It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.” (Lou Holtz) And I was able to keep my eyes on the solution, carrying the code through without being burdened by the problems, and use my knowledge the best way that I know how.