Course Reflections

Instrumentation and controls for biological systems is biosystems engineering's introduction to electrical systems and sensors. I was worried early on in the class, because I did not have much experience with these topics. I soon became well equipped to solve any technical problem. The class was capped off with a hands on project in teams of two. This project required each team to code and build an arduino circuit that could make a sensor reading from a temperature gauge, output that data to a website, and control an analog switch for a heat lamp from the website. I chose to challenge myself with this project and added lines of code so that the data from the sensor alone would control the analog switch to the heat lamp. I really enjoyed the challenge of taking classroom knowledge and applying it to a project with clear results. This class and project has given me a new interest in sensors and the coding that works along with them. I hope that this is a topic that I am able to include in my future research as a graduate student.