Engineering Update #3 – Midterm Update and Project Progress

It’s been a little while since my last post, so here’s a quick rundown of what’s been going on this past week.

Starting with school, I got my midterm grade back, and I scored a 48/100. Normally, that would be pretty disappointing, but for the first time in a while, I was actually excited to get a grade this low. As the professor handed back the exams, he was talking about the average for the class, and it was a 21/100. From the beginning of the semester, I knew this would be my toughest class, and it’s definitely lived up to that. Now with only 10 days left of my junior year, I know I need to find a way to stay focused and finish strong.

On the project side, I’ve been making steady progress on my Laser Measuring Device. The most recent update is that I added a button that controls the power of the circuit. Sounds simple, but it ended up taking longer than I expected. I didn’t want the button to only work while it was held down, I wanted it to toggle with each click. So to do that, I had to track two things in my code: the current state of the button (HIGH or LOW), and its previous state. This way, I could check for what’s called a rising edge; when the button changes from LOW to HIGH. That triggers the toggle. It helps avoid false signals and makes sure each press only flips the state once, even if the button’s a little noisy.

I also picked up a few new parts for the circuit. First, I swapped out my Arduino Uno R3 for a Nano. The Nano is a lot smaller, which is perfect for compact projects like this, and even better when I eventually switch to a custom PCB. I also got a new I2C OLED screen, which has much better resolution compared to my old 16-pin parallel LCD. That said, I had to switch over to a different library to get the new OLED working, so I updated my code and rebuilt the circuit; and after a little bit of debugging, everything’s up and running again.

Luminous OLED Screen Board

Next on the to-do list for this project is now figuring out how to add a portable power source. I’m looking into rechargeable battery modules that can reliably power the circuit at 5V. I know this part is going to be more challenging than the rest but I’m excited to learn and experiment with these new modules. Until next time!