Week 2

Hello Again!

Last week was incredibly exiting! Here's an update on my two projects!

1. Update on my Arduino Project: 

Last week was the first week that I was really able to get my hands dirty with the Arduino. Once I installed all the necessary software, I pulled up a website that had various tutorials and mini projects that were intended for beginners to understand the basics of circuits and programming. One mini project I did, for example, was turning an LED light on an off by pressing a button. Although a simple project like this has no real application to the one I intend on pursuing, it allows me to understand the fundamentals and the basics of how Arduinos work and how they are programmed.

Here are two pictures: 

On the left you can see a project I did, in which you would press a button and the corresponding LED light (red, yellow, or green) would get brighter every time you pressed the button. After 4 presses, however, the LED light goes back to dim.  

On the right are the parts I'm going to use in my project. In the middle you can see the Arduino (greenish-blueish colored thing). To the left of it are some wires, above and below some resistors and capacitors, and in the top right, a USB cable that plugs from your Arduino to the computer. 

     2.  Update on my Polymer Coating Project:

Last week on Tuesday, Richard, the graduate student that I'm working with, discovered that a chemical engineer and biomedical engineer at Cornell University already managed to coat Platinum with this PEDOT:Nafion composite polymer. Although I though that this was going to be a major set back, turns out that this allows us to use these platinum coated electrodes to do more interesting experiments. The professors at Cornell coated platinumm electrodes, however, they didn't put them to use and we are going to attempt to do that. 

On Wednesday, I, with the help of Richard, repeated the experiment outlined in the paper, step by step. First, after multiple stoicheometry calculations, I created a .01 M solution of EDOT. I then placed all my electrodes in the solution and ran a current through the electrodes. Around 200 seconds after the initial current was applied we looked at the chronopotentiometric curves ( Potential/V vs Time) they got and they aligned incredibly well with ours. 

Although this was just a repeat of someone else experiment, it was exiting to know that we could coat platinum and that we can move on to further experiments. 

In the next few weeks I will coat the platinum electrodes and then we will perform some further experiments and then put them to the test. I can't wait to see what we'll see.

See you soon!

P.S. I got my own lab notebook this week, and I won't lie, I feel pretty special.