During the beginning of the week, I worked with John to write arduino sketches and test our solenoids to ensure that a physical implementation would be feasible and practical. We were concerned firstly with ensuring the utility of the shift registers and secondly with making sure they were able to send bits to the solenoids. Firstly, we tested the shift registers with LEDs. We wrote test cases and passed them through an arduino and out to the shift registers, and finally to the LEDs. We struggled with the timing of the bits. Though it was apparent that the bits were indeed reaching the LEDs, their timing was off and some bits “stayed” for too long; ie. the LEDs did not turn off in time. I deduced that this was due to a timing issue. We were only pulsing the signals to the shift registers, and the time was too short for it to be consistently registered, thus the unintended behaviour. We added small delays between enabling and disabling signals and the LEDs behaved as intended.
On the software side, I began to think of classes with which to store the output. I wrote some class definitions and preliminary class functions with which to use for the time:frequency format of the data we will be working with.