Week 2

Week 2:

My second week into my project started with a strong pace. I was introduced to Broderick, who was going to be helping me on my project. So, I learned my final product is going to be a control loop for a heater in a printer head. This heater is used for heating up the ink that the printer head ejected. The heater is only to make it easier to eject ink out of the small little nozzles on the printer head itself. I was asked to use a thermistor to monitor a heater in the printer head. So the higher the temperature will positively correspond to a higher voltage. I was asked to measure this and implement a control loop so that a user could easily control the temperature themselves. I was given a development board to help me learn the basic parts of PWM and ADC software integration. While knowing how to code in java, I still had to look at and understand what C and C++ code was trying to accomplish. There are many similarities, so It was not difficult. The most challenging aspect of this week was finding out how to use and apply some voltage to a certain pin on the board using an IDE.

-2/17/17

Week 1

Week  1:

The majority of my first week was waiting in excitement to actually start on my second week. Although I was given some initial research on my project at hand, I did not have a clue on what I was getting into. I knew my schedule for both my project and my part time job for next week. And I ended up with having three days in a row, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, that I would end up working nine to five on my project then continuing to work six to ten or eleven. Some people in times of need will need to even take up two jobs exactly like this. Next week will be full of new experiences, and there will be a lot to cover from the amount of research I have done on my topics at hand. I will be working on topics and items such as N-channel MOSFETs, Thermistors, PWMs (Pulse Width Modulations), PID Controllers (Proportional Integral Derivative Controllers), and even DC motors. My mentor is away on a business trip and is happily ready to start this next Monday. Hopefully the work will actually show me a real business like aspect to engineering that I have hoped for.

- 2/10/17