My time as a MFA candidate in the
Design and Technology program at
Parsons The New School for Design.

We are in the process of building simple robots in PComp. This is a test of using an H Bridge. I went super cheap and no commitment to materials by using the breadboard as the body of the vehicle. There’s a toggle switch that controls direction. The speed of each wheel is controlled by a [...]

Joel had us try our hand at surface mount soldering last week with the TCN75A temperature sensor breakout board. I had a headache that day and having to try my patience and hand eye coordination only made it worse. But it was done. Then on to the coding part of things. This was my introduction [...]

We are researching solar power and how to go about charging batteries with it. Last week we built charge pump circuits that increase the voltage in a circuit. I got the schematic from solarbotics.net. Here it is (click for a direct link to within their frames site)… Important note: I am using 22uF capacitors in [...]

Today, Joel sent Joe Saavedra and I down to the printmaking studio to meet Bill. I can’t remember Bill’s last name. Bill is a printmaking professor and nice guy. He showed us how to use ferric chloride to etch into copper coated circuit boards. Joel had given us a couple test boards where he used [...]

Had to trudge through the snow this morning to pick up a UPS package at the station in The Bronx. I was, however, pretty okay with this because it was a box of pcomp goodies from Solarbotics. And one of the goodies I received was an Ardweeny. The Ardweeny is a backpack printed circuit board [...]

First assignment for PComp 2. The goal was to display the numbers 0-999 on a 3 digit 7-segment display using a serial connection. I used a BCD to 7-segment decoder to drive the display and then controlled that with the Arduino. Best part was successfully using bit shifting for the first time. I iterated through [...]