Lab 3 - Analog In

For this lab I set up the board so that it would read analog input values. Setting this up was simple enough. I could dim the LED with the potentiometer. The only thing that gave me a problem was getting the values printed on the screen. After some clicking around I found the serial monitor was was reading the values from the potentiometer.



After I read out values from the potentiometer, I swapped it out and stuck in a photocell. I created the voltage divider and was dimming the LED by placing my hand over the cell. I noticed that the LED did not have as great a range as the potentiometer. The LED did not dim all the way either. That has to do with the qualities of the photocell. It might have had a lower absolute dark resistance meaning it is not as sensitive to low light and the resistance never went high enough to completely turn of the LED. Here are photos of the LED with my hand off and then on the photocell.




Unfortunately, after these two successes, I got stump. I attempted to read in values from a photocell that I had inserted into a practice drum pad to make a drum trigger that would output MIDI. I followed a tutorial from a site called TodBot and got code from the ITP site. My best efforts were thwarted and I can only hope to revisit this when we have do the MIDI output lab for class.