Hello all,

Whoa, it’s been nearly a month since our last update. Not much to report, we’ve mostly been putting our heads down and working. Putting together a course and running it takes a lot of work. But even when we’re troubleshooting Arduino FTDI driver issues, we find it rewarding to know that definitely this is the first time people have been exposed to microcontrollers and Arduino.

We learned to clearly explain and mark out critical instructions, as several students plugged their potentiometers in backwards, which on our pots will produce smoke. Fortunately the kits worked fine once the pots were plugged in correctly. We’ve even had students point out mistakes in our course, which is great.

magic smoke

(image from one of students)

Not many people have been showing up to office hours, but we’ve been able to give really hands-on help to those who have.

Also, we spent a bit of time and, although it’s a bit later than promised, we have now released most of our files into the public domain. We’re holding onto some of the firmware so as not to spoil our students, and the solidworks files are a bit disorganized as we no longer have access to solidworks, but most of the files can be found on github now:https://github.com/narwhalEDU/CopyCat

Thanks and hope our kit backers are enjoying the course and everyone has received their rewards by now!

–Nancy and Cappie