Realtime Project - So Close

Today was meant to be the last day myself and Luke worked on this project until the presentation, unfortunately this was not the case…

At 9 o’clock this morning I went to Maplins to pick up our Miniature Potentiometer, which I was assured would solve our battery problems. This was not true as when I attached it to our circuit it burst into flames!! So i took it back where i was told “Well, of course its gonna blow up if you add it to THAT circuit” So after a little disccusion on customers service I was on my way back to the lab with 12 AA batteries and a 4 battery connectors. using weaker batteries did seem to do the trick, and seems so obvious now …so why didn’t anyone mention it to us sooner!! I blame everyone but myself :) 

Once the battery issue was sorted there was a host of other issues cropping up, including; Wires coming loose, Petri Dishes getting smashed and magnets flying around all over the place.

As I mentioned, we are now one petri dish short of a project, so we will be heading back to davy tomorrow (Sunday) to hunt for some more…

The last problem we encountered today was with adding Ferrofluid to the water. So far in this project we have been adding minuscule amounts of Ferrofluid to the test with, so today when we added a larger amount we were surprised to find that the fluid was less reactive and when in contact with the surface of the water, it bleeds across the surface. So we shall be using a lot smaller amounts in the future. 

In Conclusion:

We encountered a lot of problems today and made a 8 hour session in university seem a lot longer. Hopefully with the arrival of the new petri dish everything should go smoothly tomorrow as every problem we have encountered we have solved, So here’s hoping…