Everything Works!!!

This has been a very challenging week in regard to our balloon project.  Last week we finished soldering out circuit board...The we wired an LED to it to tell us that everything is working if the light is on.  When we went to download software onto the circuit board it kept giving us a communication error.  And thus began the hours and hours of debugging.  Our mentor professor couldn't figure out the problem, we couldn't figure out the problem, we didn't know what to do.

Finally on Monday after re-soldering potential bad connections and removing solder from where it shouldn't be, I had the idea to plug in and test other circuit boards to the computer.  Every board failed.  This finally told us that the problem wasn't out circuit board, but the connection to the computer.  We brought out a laptop that wasn't connected to the school's network and VOILA! everything works!!!!  Our diagnosis is that because of the schools network security the driver for the cable we were using was not being installed on the computer, making every effort to download software onto our circuit board a failure.

I wish we would have tested that sooner, but after this experience it was nice to know that we did everything right the first time.  This week was not a very visually stimulating week, but here is a video all about the only comfort our group knew of for the past week..the LED