Wednesday, 30 May 2007

Day Three - Soldering my first circuit and installing an operating system on a computer!


I started my day preparing to solder my L.D.R. circuit. We went back over what we did yesterday and and drew out a rough circuit diagram. I was then given all of the various components that I would be using. Once I knew what I was supposed to be doing, I started assembling all of the different parts onto the Vero board, a more complicated procedure than it sounds! After a couple of test runs(and quite a bit of time; it took a lot of thought!!), the circuit was ready to be soldered. I then began to solder all of the components into place.

However, when I had finished everything and supplied my little circuit with the 9V power supply that it needed, my L.E.D. wouldn't turn on when I blocked the L.D.R.! We discussed the problem and we guessed that there might have been a problem with either the L.E.D. or the transistor. It was very possible that I might just have supplied the L.E.D. with a little bit too much heat when I was soldering it onto the Vero board!! So, either the L.E.D. burned out or I had short-circuited it! We went back and took out the transistor. Then, the L.E.D. These were then replaced with new parts and the circuit was tried out again. It worked perfectly this time...finally! When the circuit was connected to a source of power(the battery), the L.E.D. stayed off because the L.D.R. was resisting the flow of electricity. When the L.D.R. was covered and no light could get through, the L.E.D. turned on because their was very little resistance in the circuit.

Here is photo of my fully functioning circuit!




For the last part of the day, we installed an operating system on a computer and also took a quick look inside. A new hard drive also had to be installed before re-booting. This is a photo of our newly installed software running successfully!!