Week 11

This week I was setting up the system and trying to get more than just a contact closure to work. I ended up fighting with the wrong type of sensor and accidentally coming across a clearly incorrect solution but one that produced the output I wanted. I stopped when I hit a brick wall of not really grasping why what seemed to be simple wiring would not work. It turned out to be NPN vs PNP wiring of a transistor and the sensor using NPN which references voltage from the hot lead, and requires a load between the return/sense lead and the hot lead, which we could not do, because our interface references the cold lead, and is not configurable to be changed. This later understanding made my struggles make more sense because i was trying to use the wrong piece of gear for the application.

Week 12

This week was spent fighting with npn and pnp sensors, making sure that the inputs to the system were doing what we wanted them to do and metering between different points and just generally coming from a theoretical understanding to a practical understanding of the circuit