All day today  I worked on my pong game, with the exception of a long lunch break at the RISE room.  This was to be my last day at work.... I thought I'd go to work and work on pong until around 5pm and decide it was too big of a task to finish by the Symposium time tomorrow. 

Well, the big and small of it was that 5o'clock rolled around and all the other girls headed out for the day.... leaving me to be the last one of the RISE program left in the lab.  Ed was still there and since Aimi had yet to share with me how I was to use her EMG circuit design she built or even how the input/output was integrated into the circuit, he suggested that I go talk to Pamela about the status of the project. 

Next thing I know we're working on the game and finally determine that the amplifier Aimi designed was insufficient and in order to get a strong enough signal from the EMG circuit we'd have to have a more complex filter in order to isolate the electrical impulses from the muscles.  So Pamela really wanted (and I did too somewhere in my mind and if it weren't so late) for me to be able to have this demonstration in a working condition for the symposium, so instead of the signals coming from the EMG circuit, we constructed two game 'controllers' of sorts.  by connecting a potentiometer to a triax cable that was in turn connected to the data aquisition card, we could control the pong game in a similar manner.  The program I wrote would output 5V.  The output was connected to each player's potentiometer.  The potentiometer is a device that allows you to control how much of the voltage you put in flows across the resistor - a variable resistor.  So by having the 5V voltage source the user could control the potentiometer so that anywhere from 0 to 5V was output back to a different channel on the data acquisition card.

My program worked such that whatever voltage the potentiometer output at the start of the program was functionally equal to zero and therefore if you increased the amount of voltage let through the potentiometer, the paddle would move to the right, and then if you decreased the amount of voltage let through the potentiometer, the paddle will move to the left.

Sometime during the evening, Makesh went out and brought pizza back for us!  :)  that was cool... i was getting hungry and all...

Anyway, we finished up around 3am and Pamela gave me a ride home.