Our “learning groups” will function much like our jigsaw process did last week. However, I am not going to provide you with the readings. Instead, you are going to be finding the readings that you think we should be doing over the coming weeks to support our learning on the following topics:
Temperature sensing
Light sensing
Servo motors
Stepper motors
Solar panels
In developing the materials that you think your classmates need to read, I think there needs to be a balance of two kinds of material:
Practical Application. These might be short articles or videos that explain how to use/build with these components in conjunction with the Arduino.
Theoretical Considerations. For example, solar panels can be arranged in parallel or series; how do we do calculations to determine the voltage and current from these arrays of panels? (For example, here is a longish blog post/web page about one individual’s work developing their own solar panel. It is light on theory, but gives you a sense for the kind build you need some theory for…)
Industry Application / Research. This is difficult, but tools like Google Scholar might help here. Is there a “bigger picture” article that you think should be read or studied as part of our work? For example, I found this article titled “Photovoltaics in Zimbabwe: lessons from the GEF Solar project.” It looks potentially interesting. I found this by searching for “solar panel” on Google Scholar. The article it linked to was made avaialble from the journal Elsevier; it turns out, they wanted $20 for the article. However, one of the authors put the PDF of the same article on their webpage. I found this by doing a plain-old-Google-search for the full title of the paper. The PDF of the paper popped right up…
These are examples of the kinds of things you might look for, so that we have three or four good resources for each of the topics above. You will use the same jigsaw groups that we used for the previous assignment; they are posted in Moodle.