Authors

We are Justin and Allyson. As a team of high school interns, we strive to perform our best at finding prime renewable energy.

Work in UH research lab (SCEL)

   – Learn about energy and sustainability
   – Learn about hardware, software, communications, & sensor networks
   – Work in teams
   – Work on oral and written communication skills
   – Have fun and get to know other interns, mentors, faculty

Monday - 6/20/16

We went over the safety checklist for the lab. We opened and tested the Belkin WeMo Insight Smart Plug. We spent two hours trying to set it up due to poor instructions provided. It was a good source of renewable energy but we realized that it would not last that long due to the wearing down of the metal clicker. We set a goal to build a simple version of the smart plug (excluding the ability to connect to a phone app).

Tuesday - 6/21/16

We were introduced to circuits and the bread/proto boards. We learned the units for voltage, current, and resistance, as well as Ohms law, the voltage divider, and the power formula. We practiced solving for power, voltage, current, and resistance in series circuits.

Wednesday - 6/22/16

We listened to Dr. Anthony Kuh's lecture about Hawaii's current energy situation as well as future plans such as the smart grid. After the lecture, we were given three drawings of parallel circuits to build and solve for resistance, current, power, and voltage. We were also introduced to solar panels.

Thursday - 6/23/16

We continued learning about solar panels by going outside and measuring the voltage and current of different sources connected to the solar panel. The different sources we measured with were full batteries, empty batteries, short circuits, open circuits, and fans. After gathering our data, we solved for the power generated and saw how the maximum power was not being used. Dr. Anthony Kuh also talked to us about the inefficiency of solar panels in comparison to fossil fuels.

Friday - 6/24/16

We learned about the Arduino and how to program it. First, we navigated the Arduino programming Integrated Development Environment (IDE). After, we were able to program the Arduino to blink and measure the voltage given.

Monday - 6/27/16

Our lab day began with an overview on coding using C++ on an Arduino program. Then we ate lunch and had a delicious taste of Andrew's Tim Tams and UH Manoa's food court meals. After that, we went back to a little more complicated coding and created circuits of our own as well as programming them. Then we were presented a current sensor that we were needed to program and make it perform the function to measure voltage, current and power. However, this took us 2 hours to do but this is an important part of our own project.

Tuesday - 6/28/16

We created stoplights using arduino and programming skillz. Then we programmed two stoplights to show, and finally a stoplight with a blinking crosswalk. We also worked with lcd display boards and played around with the program to see how it works. Then, we tried to use it in joint with the current sensor, in which we accidentally fried after misplaced wires. However, after soldering a new one, we managed to get it to work.

Wednesday - 6/29/16

We built a circuit with PCB Power Relay G6Ms. With these power relays we were able to turn on and off an led. After we finished working with the led, we began learning how to program xbees. It took us the rest of the day to solve the problem.

Thursday - 6/30/16

During regular session today, we did our first mock presentation. In the lab, we gave tours to middle school visitors. During the tour, Dr. Kuh introduced us to signal processing and machine learning. After we watched video and listened to his mini lecture, we continued to set up and program xbees. We were finally able to finish programming the xbees and send messages wirelessly.

Friday - 7/1/16

We continued to program the xbees and wirelessly send messages. Today, we took it a step further and tried to program the xbees to work with arduinos instead of computers. We struggled throughout the day and we were unable to do it without the help of Andrew. However, we all could not get the xbees to work with two arduinos.

Tuesday - 7/5/16

Today Dr. Kuh also came into the lab to give us a brief overview on machine learning. We also continued to try programming the xbees and arduinos to wirelessly send messages. Andrew gave us hints on how to get our arduino program to work. His hints were: rx.getData(0) and rx.getDataLength(). We were unable to get the arduino and xbees to work.

Thursday - 7/7/16

Today, we continued programming the xbees. We were able to get an xbee to wirelessly send messages to the other xbee with the arduino. After we were able to accomplish that, we tried to get the two xbees to connect and send wirelessly with two arduinos. We programmed the xbee and arduino that sent the message and Skylar and Dane programmed the xbee and arduino that received the message.

Friday - 7/8/16

Today, we were able to finally get the two arduinos and xbees to work together. We programmed them to send packets back and forth. With the arrival of Andrew Obatake, the problem between the transferring of messages from one xbee to another was magically fixed. I am starting to think that Andrew is a wizard, because if 3 undergrad students and 4 summer interns were unable to fix it, yet this man was able to in less than 30 minutes, the only logical explanation must be that he is a wizard.

Monday - 7/11/16

We first built and programmed our own arduino game. The players that played our game would race to see who could press the button 20 times. When the player reached 20, the led would light up and The first person to reach 20 the fastest would win. Dane and Skylar built a memory game. After we finished our games, we started refreshing ourselves with lcd boards and current sensors by looking back on our previous circuit. We then continued to program our xbees. We started to program our xbee and arduino to display a message sent from Dane and Skylar's circuit. Our circuit would receive their message of current, power, and voltage.

Tuesday - 7/12/16

Today, we continued to program our circuits to receive Skylar and Dane's message. We were able to receive their payload and send a payload to them. We are continuing to work on sending and receiving voltage, current, and power. Dane and Skylar are working on sending all three of their messages to us. And we are working on deciphering which number is power, current, or voltage and displaying it on the lcd board.

Friday - 7/15/16

For today, we once again worked on the Arduino and the Xbee modules to have two Xbees and two Arduinos to communicate with each other. We had fought hard but with the dust settling and the sun setting, it almost seemed we were in a losing battle. However, with the surprise assistance of Mandrew Obatak-bae and Seyyed, we managed to somehow get the arudinos and xbees to work with each other and the battle was won in favor of team peacock.

Monday - 7/18/16

During the first half of today, we reviewed pre-calculus and began learning some calculus. Gordon was able to teach us about calculating secant and tangent lines. After our math lesson, we continued working on the xbees and arduinos.

Tuesday - 7/19/16

Today we started measure and designing a housing unit for our project. We were able to design our entire unit but we weren't able to print it out due to the time it would take. However, we were able to print out the wall piece of the unit but nothing else. After designing everything, we learned how to solder as our wall was printing out. We practiced soldering on resistors and boards.

Wednesday - 7/20/16

Today we are debugging the code to make it more efficient. We are struggling to do so at the moment. We also performed mock presentations to all our lab mentors and Dr. Anthony Kuh. We were given comment and ways to edit and fix up the presentation to make it better. We hope to be prepared for our presentations tomorrow and July 29.

Contributing authors:

atrang jramos

Created by jramos on 2016/06/22 00:42.

Introduction

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Authors

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