12/8

The group decided to meet up outside of class to make the last minute touches on the power point and to put together the enclosure and the circuit. Kelly and Emily had bound up twigs and bark to give a "natural" enclosure. Since our project 2 was put in a bird house, our idea of tree preservation was kind of hypocritical. Next stop...presentation day!

12/6 class

After speaking with Noah about his path with his groups amplifier, Josh and I gave in and went out and bought the pre-made amplifier. Basically what it is is if your in a speech and can't hear the speaker, this device has head phones that plug in and the microphones in the device amplify the sound for you. After purchasing it from Radio Shack, I opened it up and soldered an extension wire to the ends of the positive and negative connections. The device is powered by 2 AAA batteries (3volts). I then soldered leads for the input where the microphone is connected. The speaker we used for our project 2 came from a computer speaker so we decided that since the speaker was already out, why not cut the speaker plug off too! soldering leads from the speaker to the plug was our next step. Connecting and turning everything on, our circuit finally works! Today was a successful work day finally!!!

12/2 class

Today was yet again another work day, which we really needed! The amplifier circuit from last time did not work so we tried a few more today. Very stressful to not get the expected results. There was a distorted noise coming out of the speaker but who knows what it actually was. Almost ready to resort to the path that Noah took with his groups project!

11/29 class

after a nice long well rested thanksgiving break, its time for some work! today was another work day so we split the team up. Josh and I went to the engineering building and tried to create an amplifying circuit to project the sound better. Kelly and Emily did more research about the tree species and went on a walk to collect material from the woods for out enclosure. Josh had bought an IC chip (LM386) from Radio shack. The LM386 is a low voltage audio amplifier which can have a gain of 20 to 200. we found a pre-made circuit online that we tried but we were unsuccessful. back to the drawing board! 

11/22 Class

Today was a work day, we just found out that project 3 has been canceled and that we have to now "re-do" project 2 as if we are presenting it for a grant to make this art work a reality. Talking to my group (Josh, Kelly, and Emily) we went over the critique from our original project 2 and what we need to change to evolve this project into a proposal for a grant. Having taken our project 2 apart already, we have some re-building to do, although this might be a good thing.