Third Day

Today it was left to just George and I to figure out some of the modules that we had in the kit. We focused mainly on the laser module, but we also deciphered what other modules worked!
Examples of other modules below:

(TOUCH/ Metal touch Interface KY-036)
At first glance, you would believe that it would be a simple module that would send a 1 or 0, like a button. With further investigation, it is actually a pressure sensor. The default value it would give out(meaning without changing the sensitivity) would be 4095 and would decrease to 0 the harder you push. Giving it power would simply make it run by itself, but would you connect a pin from AO to something that supports Analog (ie X5) and run Pin.ADC, you would then get the actual input.

(SMALL SOUND/ Sensitive microphone sensor KY-037(?), in picture just image the cylindrical grey object a lot smaller.)

It is exactly and identical to BIG SOUND, except more sensitive and more dissapointing.

 

(IR EMMISION/ Infrared emission sensor)

George and I thought this one was the 7-colored LED light. To our dismay and without checking the voltage,  we learned that it emits a very, very strong scent when burnt out. Luckily, there is a spare left but as a reminder to all out there - it goes from 3-4 volts. (Sorry Kevin!)

 (7 COLOR/ Automatic flashing colorful LED module. LOOKS SIMILAR TO INFRARED, WATCH OUT)

 At first, George and I thought we blew out this module. But after 4 hours of the small blow out, we realized that the 7 color module was different than the infrared. Be careful when working with X1nda modules as they reversed where you are to put ground and the AO input (in this case, ground goes to S and the AO output would be at -). Also to note, nothing goes in the middle at all. 

George worked on this one all by himself (something I wish to do once in this internship, one day though!), so he should have some more information about this than I am able to provide. (if he ever does so)

All I know is that you would have to program this to be dim if you wanted it to work with 5 volts, as we learned with the infrared module.

What George and I (truthfully, George did the majority of the work for simplicity sake) tried to test out the most would be this module.

(LASER(!) EMIT/ Laser sensor module KY-008)
Kevin and I were trying to figure out how this one worked, but George managed to solve the case for this. To being, I should demonstrate what exactly DAC commands are:

DAC (Digital(default) to Analog) commands are used to output analog values( or a specific voltage) and can only be used with 2 specific pins: X5 and X6. The voltage would run from 0-3.3V (at least thats what sources say). dac.write, as shown above, would change the voltage that goes through the module, which could be seen as a chance to not blow up your poor module like we did.

There are different methods for DAC, such as dac.noise(frequency) and dac.triangle(frequency), each requiring a frequency number for it to function. dac.triangle() creates, not surprisingly, a triangle wave would repeat relating to the number you placed for frequency. dac.noise() gives out a random sample for the output at the given frequency.

I will eventually place out the code that varies the laser's brightness in full depth, but for now I think that this post has been quite long! I also have to figure out how to use python-sphinx on my own for something else for now, so until next time! ;)


~~Links~~
https://tkkrlab.nl/wiki/Arduino_37_sensors <-more about the modules we are testing
http://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/library/pyb.DAC.html <-more about DAC commands