Week of 10/27 - 10/31

This week, I finally got everything to work, and I'm happy it's finally complete. At the start of this week, I was mostly focused on the breadboard and trying to get it to work again. Last time, I had made the mistake of not making sure everything lined up perfectly.

After I made sure the breadboard worked and aligned the parts on the PCB so that they lined up with what I had on the breadboard, I got to soldering. I had to resolder the sensor wire, but I also soldered the PCB in place.

At first, it wasn't working, and I thought I would have to redo everything again, but I soon realized the issue. The 5-volt side was working fine, and I could see it was because of the LED; it was just the 12v side that was causing problems.

I realized that this was because the MOSFET was switched around. I had switched to a different MOSFET, and when I did that, the pins also switched, so I had to resolder that, which took longer than I thought it would, but I successfully finished it by the end of Thursday's class.

I then assembled everything into the PCB box, and luckily, everything fits perfectly. The only issue I have now is that the length of the sensor makes it so that the box has to stay behind the electromagnet, but that's what I had planned for it since the beginning, so it should be okay.