Tape Solves Everything... Almost

I found out that I had two problems. One was that approximately half of my long breadboard is not working properly, so I had to squish my sensors onto a smaller breadboard that I am borrowing. My other problem was that if the headers on my arduino are perfectly straight, then they are actually not touching the connections on the board. I don't want to solder them down because that would create problems when I want to eventually attach the shield later on. So I used taped to pull them together and so the headers are leaning into the connections on the board. (I can hear the engineers grumbling at my outside of the box solution...)

Anyways... 
I've been slowly collecting all the parts I expect to need in order to start my TRAVIS II research. Before I get going on that I thought I should re-create my TRAVIS I setup to test out the softpots. Recap on why:

• When plugging into the Lilypad there is no jitter when the sensors are at rest
• The MKR shield was all soldered before I could test it with the sensors
• When plugging into the MKR1000 the softpots have a bit of jitter when they are rest. The values flicker between 0-10. This may possibly be because the lilypad is 5V and the MKR is 3.3V 
• I cut out the jitter and re-scaled the values inside my Max programming. The values 0-10 are right at the edge of the fingerboard. I would never play up that high anyways, so having that little bit of the softpots ignored was not a loss. I did not want to de-solder everything if it works the way I need it to. 

I wondered if maybe trying out different resistors for the softpots would fix the problem. Now that I purchased a new MKR1000 for TRAVIS II, I thought I would test it out before starting the new project.

• I started by re-making the existing connections on my breadboard.
• I tried swapping around the sensors to see if that affected anything, because back when I was working with the lilypad it was very temperamental in that all the sensors had to be in a certain order so that there was no bleeding of data. On the MKR1000 it didn't change anything 
• I tried changing the resistors in one of the softpots. I found that the minimum resistor it could use while still getting its full values was 2.2k Ohm. Any smaller and I was not getting 1023 when I squeezed the top. 
• Any larger numbered resistor than 10k Ohm did not show any difference 
• No matter what resistor I used, the softpot was ALWAYS jittery when it was at rest! :( 
  • ​​Therefore, I must accept that it is impossible to take out the jitter on the MKR1000 with these particular sensors, and continue to hide the jitter in my programming.