Tech Class 3 – Thursday July 8, 2010
To start today’s class we had out first test. And it was quite a lengthy one at that! There was a lot of material to review, and it was a variety of material. I thought the test was decent considering how much I studied, but I definitely could have studied more.
Upon completion of the test, we started again with visual basic and using our hardware kits. Today’s goal was to set up a web came, and with the use of specific phidget boards, we had to make the webcam move using the hardware pieces and visual basic. Unfortunately, it did not go over well… At all. The programming seemed to be wrong, and no matter how many times we tried coding visual basic and the phidget/webcam, there was barely any success. We did get the motor moving at one point, and we also got the webcam to turn on, but after that nothing seemed to work. This was the case for the majority, if not all of the class.
We were not really sure as to why we could not get anything working. We troubleshooted various ways to alter our codes, and neither seemed to really work. One minute our USB cable could not be detected by the computer, then the next minute it would be. Then we though maybe out phidget board was not working properly, but could not make a decisive decision on that because of the lack of consistency with out USB cables and the coding. When it was all said and done, we did not have a very productive day today, and today’s activities were suppose to be very helpful for our future in this course.