In trying to complete the Transistor Lab I ran into a few problems. First, I have a potentiometer that is wired with misleading colors, so when I first hooked up the circuit it was drawing too much power from the USB port. My Mac immediately shut down the port. I fixed that issue, but my motor still wasn’t turning, so I made an appointment to get some help from Kate. She immediately noticed that I had mistaken a capacitor for a diode.

Capacitors

A silly mistake, but not so difficult given that there was a picture of a capacitor in the materials list for the lab. We replaced the capacitor with a diode, but the motor was still not responding when we turned the potentiometer. Kate started troubleshooting by having me edit the code so that it would print the potentiometer values in the serial window to confirm that the potentiometer was working correctly. We tried assigning new pins for the output to the motor, and we tried inserting an LED at each point in the circuit. We found that power was flowing correctly at either end of the circuit, but there is still a problem around the transistor and the diode.