10/23 - 10/26

This week I worked on fixing the breakbeam sensors for the jump meter. They were having a problem where no matter what, they were never reading as high, which is supposed to be their default state when across from each other. I tried just printing the four pins' values, but that didn't work either, printing zeroes instead of 1's which would indicate that the sensors are reading high. I tried switching out the sensors to see if it was a hardware problem, but that didn't work either.

I started trying to fix the problem by switching from a PCB to a breadboard model in order to make sure that the problem was with the software rather than the hardware. This came with its own problems, such as using physical resistors instead of the on-board pullup resistors. Once I got the board working, the code still only printed zeroes to the serial monitor. This didn't confirm that it was only a software problem however, so I used a multimeter to test if the sensors read high when they were across from each other, and they all did, confirming the problem was in the code.

I decided to switch to only using one sensor at a time

to see if that would help and it did, reading the sensors as "1" meaning high when the sensors had a direct line of sight to each other, or "0" meaning low when the sensors' line of sight was disrupted.

Finally, I added the other three sensors back in, and it was able to read them all as high and low. After going through each individual part, I found that the problem was coming from the arrays that were supposed to set the sensors as high, so when I set it up to individually read them all, it was able to read all four sensors.