First Labs or, The Joy of Discovery

I walked into the NYU computer store today and decided to buy all my own stuff, so I would be able to work on labs at home given my busy schedule which doesn't always align with lab hours. Excited to try it out, I ran home, unpacked a tool kit, a supplementary tool kit, and Lab Kit 1. For the first lab, merely setting up the breadboard with a voltage regulator, everything seemed peachy. I clipped and stripped the wires and set up yhr breadboard as illustrated:

Starting Lab 2, I picked up my handy Multimeter to measure the voltage across components. This is where things started to go downhill. I wasn't sure of exactly the best method for measuring voltage "across a component". I lined up the black wire of the multimeter with an exposed bit from a black "ground" wire on my breadboard. I did the same for red. I got a reading around 14.80. Based on the lab instructions I should have had a reading of 0.5 from power to ground, due to my 5 volt regulator. Puzzled, I placed the multimeter needles on either side of the regulator, and a blue spark came out. I'm relatively certain this wasn't supposed to happen. I replaced the regulator with a fresh one, and pressed on despite the descrepancy.

I took a big, shiny red button out of the lab kit, stripped two lengths of green wire and soldered them to the underside. It looked pretty peachy, until I tried to bend the wires and get them into the breadboard, and one of them snapped. I think I may have been using the supplied wire stripper improperly. Still undaunted, I remembered my supplemental tool kit came with a desoldering pump!

I held my iron to the snapped bit of soldered-in wire, and attempted the pump operation several times, without success. At this point the button seemed to come apart of its own accord. My own uninformed theory is that the soldering iron was on it for too long, and the heat disagreed with the metal bits in the button.

I picked a smaller, much less impressive looking button from the kit, and managed to get two wires on it without a problem, although they looked dangerously close to eachother, based on the proximity of the button's contact points.

I put together the rest of the circuit, using what the internet led me to believe was a 220-Ohm resistor (red, red, brown, silver). Looking at all my wires and components in the right places, with a smile on my face, I plugged the thing in and hit the button!

And nothing happened. The cherry red LED refused to light. I noticed that I had sort of melted the two wires leading to the button together. I also realized that I have no idea what I am doing.

However, I believe that the learning process is the process of failing less and less miserably as time goes on, and I plan on spending much of the day in the lab tomorrow doing just that.