This week, we began working with piezo buzzers on our Arduino boards to create simple melodies. I really enjoyed this task, as playing and creating music is one of my favourite hobbies. The class was tasked with coding a short melody into the buzzers. I found this very fun and relatively easy because of my previous musical experience. That said, I found it strange to manually code the specific durations and delays between notes. When I play an actual instrument, the rhythm and timing of notes come naturally without thinking. So translating that into precise values in my code took a lot of focus and trial and error.

We also looked at cleaning up and organising our code by using things like arrays, functions, classes and header files. This reminded me of the similar process we went through in the web development unit earlier this year. I definitely see why this is an essential step while coding. However, doing it ended up breaking a feature I had put in. I had originally programmed an LED to flash in sync with each note played by the piezo buzzer, using the same duration variable. But, after reconstructing my code into separate files and different classes, that duration variable became less accessible, and I couldn’t control my LED as easily now. Hopefully, I’ll figure out a different way of doing this next week.

This week, we also started looking at our research essays. It was strange but useful getting back into the academic writing mindset, as I hadn’t written proper essays for a couple of years. I was excited to start this essay, as I felt passionate and had ideas for all of the available topics. I even touched on some of these topics in my personal statement. So, I think I’m going to struggle to choose which topic to write about.