Starting to play with Arduino more. First I’ve fiddled with electronic assembly in ~20 years and the biggest learning is: middle-aged eyesight and finger dexterity suck. Reading resistor values and assembling even a simple circuit was more eye/finger strain than I expected.
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And yeah, as people are suggesting... just ordered one of those helping hand/magnifying glass thingies
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I haz digital inputs. These teeny switches were annoying to insert. I’m working through the Elegoo mega 2560 kit manual, one experiment every morning. Takes about 15-20 minutes. Right now focusing on the mechanical assembly skills, not really tweaking the canned sketches.
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Bought the helping hands too. Between that and the cheapie usb microscope. I’m set as far as vision issues are concerned for now.
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This is the kit I’m working with. Will try to log my adventures on this thread systematically. Very good value. Just $50. Nicely packaged, good instructions and bug-free code samples so far. Digital inputs is experiment 5. amazon.com/EL-KIT-008-Pro
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I have achieved LCD level of Arduinoing.
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Now at read-a-sensor stage.
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Shit last update was 12/26 which means I had 2 months off the electronics track. I gotta find a way to cycle through electronics sessions more often. At this rate I’ll never get to rover control.
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Progress. Now I know how to get some lurid blinking going without using up a lurid number of pins. 3 pins to control 8. Soon, 1 ring to control 19.
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Didn’t work initially, some of the leds weren’t working. After laboriously testing them, discovered the 74HC595 shift register chip wasn’t seated properly across the gutter (?) of the breadboard. Had to prise it off and reseat. In general the mechanical assembly part is fiddle.
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So far I haven’t tried designing my own circuits or writing code. Just doing the tutorials and editing code samples. Yellow-belt stuff. I need to set myself a series of green-belt to brown-belt exercises pointed generally in the direction of the black-belt projects I want to do.
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Whee. Photocell! Now I’m starting to feel powerful.
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Made slight mistake connecting power between 3v and 5v instead of ground and 5v. I’m getting better at diagnosis. Only took a few seconds to look in the right place for the error. Fortunately not a damaging error. There seem to be few irrecoverable errors in basic Arduinoing.
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Need better ergonomics. I get a slight headache every time I do electronics, even with reading glasses and magnifying glass. It’s like 3x the strain of simple laptop or phone use.
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Browsing lists of shields and hats trying to come up with ideas. 🤔
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7 segment experiment has all sorts of issues. First time it didn’t work and couldn’t figure it out, so I ripped out and rewired. Second time I had the thing upside down so the pins were all wrong. When I finally wired it right it works but randomly blinks off 10-12s at a time.
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Either I damaged it during the wrong wiring or there’s still an error. The code currently just cycles through the hex digits. Not sure where to begin troubleshooting.
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Grr. Debugging electronics is weird because when things are wrong it either just doesn't work at all, or does random shit. Like the first time I had it wired wrong, digits would randomly light up.
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The second time, weirdly enough it sorta worked even though the pins were upside down. It got some of the digits right, the others not. Now, it works, but the random turning off in the middle of the cycle is the residual bug. Setting it aside for now.
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Hmm the display is just a bunch of leds and I did some segment by segment testing. Seems to be fine. I don’t think the latch chip could have been damaged.
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Possibly something about the clock timing driving it? Why would it blink off for10-12 seconds at a time 🤔
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Skipping lightly past my partially successful LED experiment, we are now at PWM control of a motor. Stepping a motor down a 3-speed staircase, 5s per step
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You have to listen to the noise level changes since there is no visual indication
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This is I believe the first time I’ve used a non-led diode and a transistor ever, so achievement unlocked!
Arduino sketch was a bit unclear... it would run and stop after a second. But then I added a delay and it ran longer. Does a pwm pin output a default fixed length pulse?
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Anyone know why this sketch would stop after a second? When I added a delay right after the analogWrite, it ran longer
I don't see a rewrite-to-0 command on the pin, so I'd think the value would remain high at input level until I put in a different value in serial monitor?
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This is my edited sketch... just running it at 3 speeds for 5 seconds each
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In original sketch, I don't see where there's a number that says run for 1 second...
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Control with a 5v relay. This was a bitch to troubleshoot. Just wouldn’t work. Checked and double checked circuit. Coil voltage was switching correctly but load was not switching. Thought I had a fault relay...
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Figured out how to test the relay directly with a power supply and a multimeter... it was working fine. Turned out the pins are just kinda the wrong spacing and length and it just wasn't sitting correctly in the breadboard, and I had to really push it down with my thumb.
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With this, I have officially completed the Elegoo Mega2560 tutorial manual, even though it only introduced me to like half the components in the kit. Haven't used : capacitors, ultrasonic sensor, led panel, motor controller, stepper... gonna have to go hunting for sketches.
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We move into the wild lands beyond the manual by figuring out servo motor control... which lies about 0 and 180 degrees... I’ll have to dig into this mysterious servo.h library.
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