Day 9 (of experimenting, not chronologically)
Glack! Well, I have to find out why my microphone burnt out before I install another. I found a variable resistor, which I planned to plug in to my circuit at the highest resistance, and incrementally lower its resistance so that I find the perfect balance: strong enough to keep it from melting, yet weak enough to let electricity through. Sounds simple, right? Right.
Well, that's what I was about to do, when I noticed something. Two AAA batteries, right? Nowhere near the amount of voltage needed to blow out a microphone. What was wrong? After maybe an hour of frivolous scrutinization, I noticed something else: the microphone that burnt out looked a little bit different from the normal ones: its microchip was missing! The unmistakable weight/burden of realization hit me then & there: The microphone hadn't melted. At least, not the way I thought it did! Maybe during the process of soldering (melting wires together to avoid loose connections), the microchip fell/(was melted) off. Whatever the cause, I no more needed to worry about melting the microphones!
So, I plugged in the new microphone! Happily ever after, right? Wrong. It appeared that 'ghost noise' started up again. I instinctively replaced the batteries (the solution last time), which didn't help at all. As it turned out, 'twas a loose connection. They can be a real pain sometimes.
Ooh, getting a lot of work done today! Anyways, I now had the difficult task of creating a duplicate circuit (for the other hand) ahead of me. It was very difficult, to make a long story short, and I learned some new things too!
Well, now that I'd made my parallel circuit, I had to program it too! it required some array scrambling, but I got it done. All-together, I'd say it's a day well done. Err, a job well done.