Having achieve no progress on Saturday, I decided to call on my tutor Skylar, who was a student of mine. Now studying computer science at UC Irvine, he volunteered to be my “technical advisor.”
First, we began working on getting the Flora hooked up because I wanted to get to the part of the LED strip that bought lighting up.
 http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=popup_image&pID=1138 |
 http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=popup_image&pID=659 |
However, I didn’t realize that I needed an extra part. For example, to make the strip work, I needed a resistor and special hook up. Futhermore, the Flora board needed a specific program language environment that I didn’t have.
After spending 2 hours trying to figure out how to download the Flora specific Ardino program, I plugged in one of the Flora boards. After about 1/2 second, I saw a red light blinking rapidly. Then I smelt something burning. When I touched the board, it was hot! And the program kept sending me error messages.
So I stopped working on the board. Even my tutor couldn’t help me. This experience made me think about how much tacit knowledge one must possess to be able to take on a project of this kind. I just wanted the LED strip to light up based on Adafruit’s diagram. I had no idea how much I needed to know things about electricity, voltage, and data input and output of data to make this project work.
After that defeat, I decided to switch to a LiliPad to see whether I could at least make the Velostate respond to the input.
This time, I was able to make the serial monitor to respond! I was so EXCITED!!!! However, I was still apprehensive about what I had to do to make this project a success.
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