Tasks have been assigned among the students: from putting sensors together to understanding how Arduino works
One of the teachers in charge of the project: “As soon as they start to see what can be done, they really get very motivated”
Colegio Juan de Lanuza, in Zaragoza, is working on the scientific project “Zaragoza, a peculiar city?”, with which they will take part in the #ServetVI launches in spring 2022.
One of the teachers tells us about the latest progress:
All the students have different tasks assigned. Each one is getting to know, testing and documenting how their sensor works, wiring it up and running a functional test, each on their own setup. We are now at the stage where we are starting to put sensors together on a single Arduino and merge the code. We are going step by step because I have to teach everyone how Arduino works, as they had no previous experience.
Meanwhile, I have a student who is learning to design PCBs. We have it almost finished and the next step will be to send it for production and wait for it to arrive. It is going slowly too, because they had to understand how Arduino works, how to make PCBs, wait for the others to decide which ports they will connect their sensors to, and also learn to make jumpers because some share RX and TX ports.
And that’s where we are… there is a sensor we have had some difficulty with and we had to edit the library to change memory allocation values, and this has also upset our progress plans a little. Our idea is that once we have all this done, we will add a LoRa module to get the data out. For now everything is being done with the SD card module, where they have also had to learn not just to put data in a file, but in the right format so that we can later open it as a spreadsheet and review the data more comfortably.
That’s all we can tell you for now. They are really very motivated! Much more than at the beginning.. as soon as they start to see what can be done, they really get very motivated.
The project team has a website and a Twitter account where they will be posting updates on the progress of their experiment.