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.

11/14

Today is Sunday, and the project is due tomorrow. The final step in the project is just to put it all together. We have the code written for the arduino, the motion sensor is working, the wave shield is connected to the arduino and allows the arduino to play the sound file for our project. everything is working good. a problem we ran into however is our enclosure that we planned on using is too small for all of our components. To fix this, we decided to buy a bird house and put our components in that. the speaker we are using came from one of the computer speakers in Resnick at Josh's work station. with everything enclosed, we realized that it just isn't loud enough. With some purchased IC chips from Radioshack, Josh and I started working on an Audio Amplifier. However with the numerous attempts, it seems that the output that goes to the speaker is just too much for the speaker to handle. We have to present our project with a power point that has the audio file included so we can play it through the classroom speakers. Emily and Kelly worked hard to finish the power point and to paint the bird house. They did an awesome job!

11/11 class

Today was a full day of working on our project. Josh received the Wave shield kit yesterday. Josh and myself went over to Resnick to solder the Wave shield and Emily and Kelly gathered the data for the sugar maple tree. After two hours of soldering all the little components to the circuit board, our wave shield was complete and the facts and script for our maple tree was done. a lot of progress was done today! I have attached the photos of the process of soldering the wave shield.