Brandon Marsh – NMP Jacket

I am running out of time.

Over the weekend I met with Kent and we did some planning and discussing about how we would wrap up the last parts of the project. It was pretty productive I thought!

On Tuesday I met with Mark, fixed a errant wires on the phone and talked about what steps I needed to take in order to get the electronics finished and secured. I have decided to give up the camera function in order to have more stability an security.

So today I ran back and forth across town and redid my circuit today. Everything went a little smoother when I started using a better quality solder. Everything seems to be working ok, the current is stable, etc. However, when the ‘cellphone’ part of the opto-isolator is activated it diminishes all the power going to the relay(. The plans originally have a 1k resistor going to the opto-isolator and even when I bump it down to 220 it doesn’t seem to matter. I tried swapping out the transistor (2w3904), but that doesn’t seem to be the problem either.

I got word that my Wonderflex came in, I called up Kent and graciously begged him to go and pick it up for me, so hopefully he will be able to do that Friday. I’m probably not even going to get to work with it till Tuesday because I have a major paper due for my history class and I have to work at the pub on Monday due to it being St.Patrick’s Day.

All these little pauses and set-backs are starting to add up and it’s making me nervous… I wish that stuff was working already! I wish I had like an assistant at this point to go grab stuff for me while I was at work or class or whatever… oh well I guess I just have to do my best.

Fixed!

Ok just a quick update before I head off to work… I took my circuit in  to Mark and other than a few logistical issues and some loose connections there was one issue. I had wired the connection into the relay wrong! It needed to be one row over! Man did I ever feel silly.

But I got to learn why keeping different parts of your circuit separate is important and how to make and use jumper cables!