Day 3 – Now It’s Getting Hot In Here

Day 3 was a slow day, for a multitude of reasons. As I quickly learned, Thursdays are often the slowest days for the museum as a whole, so the number of kids that visited our lab decreased by a significant margin. In addition, the central air conditioning of the building crashed around 11:00, so the lab, which is a large, glass-walled room, acted in the same manner a greenhouse does, trapping heat – and us – inside. By the end of the day, the room was about 85 degrees, and that definitely didn’t encourage more foot traffic to visit our lab. As if the heat wasn’t enough, at around 3:00, my computer had a fatal error, and refused to turn on for the rest of the day. The lab has about 20 computers of it’s own, so it wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that all the code that I had written had been saved on my desktop, so it was inaccessible from the other computers. Despite all of the adverse conditions, I still had a fruitful and productive day, finishing my hardware for my Morse code decoder, complete with LCD screen and all, and assembling the circuitry for a new piezoelectronic keyboard, which would play tones at the touch of a finger. One fantastic story came when one of the lab’s volunteers, an older gentleman who helps with the kids, was looking at my project over my shoulder, and remarked “shouldn’t pin 4 connect the ground to the VCC of the LCD?” I was surprised – I had been stuck on an error for a while, and I hadn’t interacted with him previously. I said “maybe!”, and tried it out, re-uploaded the code, and it worked! It just goes to show you – take all the help you can get!

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