My Project

Aha, what about this?? That little white box next to the lamp is suppose to be my final project. It is called a "Remote Controlled Light Dimmer". Before I continue on the work process, let me explain a little bit how my light dimmer works.


First of all, it is a manual light dimmer. There are 4 push buttons at the side. Out of the 4, 3 are function buttons;

1. ON/OFF
   
2. Dim
   
3. Brighten
   

and 1 reset button.


Yeah, this is suppose the be the highlight of our project, the remote control function. Of course we had high hopes, the circuit was going well, every part falling into place.

The testing went well, first time of course, and then something happened. It started when a foreign piece of metal short circuited our board and BOOM!! Okay, not really boom, but then there was a trip at our college facilities.

Initially, didn't know what went wrong, and then, rewired the circuit, cleaned it, let it run. This time we encountered another problem

Aha, a blown capacitor, this was due to our own mistake, not checking the voltage tolerance properly before installing it.

After that, we fixed the problem but the circuit still couldn't run properly, found out the problem, lack of DC voltage to the microcontroller, we needed 5V and the reading only showed 3.7V. So we disconnected the filtering circuit, and installed an external circuit that will provide a constant 5V, yes using batteries(darn, that was what I tried to avoid since the beginning) but it seems the many blowups(we caused the college to blackout 5 times today) took a tool on our poor microcontroller, and he couldn't even say hello before waving goodbye.

Anyway, I've decided to go on and try to build another one for my own use. Oh yeah, before that, I NEED TO PREPARE THE DOCUMENTATION!! Thank God the lecturer was there to witness the blowups and he was very kind to tell us, "I think it is abit too late for you to troubleshoot anymore (obviously he's sick and tired of pushing the power switch on and on again due to the tripping)so I guess you prepare a report on the failure and list down the solutions to the circuit and make sure your documentation is complete."

WOW I felt so much better, we have been troubling him for the past week(we have been testing the circuit for the past week) due to the constant tripping of 5th floor Informatics.

Alright, now I'll have to pray hard, ask God for grace to do the presentation well tomorrow, will post about the presentation tomorrow night.