Recently, the projects I’ve taken on have been pretty bare-bones. They all involve a single type of input and output, and this time was no different in that respect. Yet this one was a bit more complicated; the input I was using was a liquid crystal display (LCD), which would respond randomly with synonyms to "yes" or "no" when the circuit was tilted, which is basically a magic 8 ball, but it’s actually called the crystal ball which is a “hilarious” play on words. Now, granted, all the things I’ve built so far were only possible with tutorials, and soon, once I feel confident, I’ll begin working on my radio telescope, but I’ll get there eventually.
Now, as I was setting everything up, I made the mistake of using only yellow and red wires for most of my connections, which will complicate things in the future. It took about an hour, but after everything was set up, I turned it on using a knob in the middle of the circuit to make sure the LCD was working, and sure enough, it was. As I was processing that fact, my hand jerked a little, nudging the circuit board ever so slightly, causing it to give me a response, just like a magic eight ball would if you shook it. I was happy, of course, because now I knew it worked.
So I stood up, grabbed my camera to record myself using it successfully, and then…
Maybe I should’ve posted this on April Fool's Day because the Crystal Ball fooled me. You could see how awestruck I was when, moments before this video, it was working, yet when I took out my camera to record, the circuit just says “peace out” and chooses not to work. And going back to what I said earlier about how all the wires were essentially the same color, I wasn’t able to figure out what went wrong because my eyes got lost in the yellow-red mess.
I contemplated doing this another day, and then I gave up. I disassembled it and put all the electronics away. I took a break for a few days to focus on school, but also because I felt bewildered by the fact that seconds before I was ready to record my most complicated project to date, it gave out on me. Though that wasn’t a reason to stop; of course, it was a minor setback, and I haven’t even begun my radio telescope project, so I had to learn how to face failure because this is just a small step on a much larger journey.
After three days, I took out my electronics and began to rebuild the Crystal Ball. It went by a bit faster because I already knew how to do most of the wiring. One thing I paid special attention to was making sure my wires were organized and not the same color. While they were still mostly green and yellow, I did a better job differentiating each one so I could troubleshoot if anything went wrong. I got it all working, reinstalled the code, and finally reattempted it after a few days.
IT WORKS! I was worried it wasn’t going to, but I was wrong. I’m happy that I solved the problem, even though I don’t even know what was causing it. Before, I tried fixing the tilt sensor, the wiring, and even the code, but all of that honestly made it worse. With this new feat, I’ll try something unique for my next project. I recently saw that you can turn on a light by touching a loose wire. I’m not sure if that’s safe, but in the name of science, I must find out. I’ll see you guys in the next blog.