A GUI ACTIVATED LED INTERFACE

This week was one of those moments - getting my LED to blink when I did something in my handcrafted GUI!! And I did it in the IDE which I really find most effective and intuitive - I've found my language. Hello Arduino and Processing. And therefore Hello Fabduino.

 

HOW TO MAKE A GUI WHICH CONNECTS TO YOUR HARDWARE

1: FIND AN EXAMPLE IN THE EXTENSIVE ARDUINO AND PROCESSING FORUMS

The Physical Pixels example on the Arduino website is a great starter to help you understand how to activate your hardware via a GUI.

In this example a simple button designed in Processing turns an LED on or off when the mouse hovers over it. I edited it to include another button and LED.


 

2: TEST IT USING AN EXISTING ARDUINO

 

3: MAKE YOUR OWN FABDUINO

As I'm definitely an Arduino/Processing fan, I made my own Fabduino using Tiffany's great page to take me through the process step by step.

It's a very fiddly board, so I also utilized the microscope, solder paste and heat bed PCB assembly workprocess to make sure that the board didn't have any shorts and worked properly first time - which it did!

Using solder paste to load all the pads on the traces and then the microscope to position the components on the solder pasted traces

Put the pasted and positioned componented board onto the heat bed, heat it up and then move the gantry over the components to weld the components to the board

4: BURN THE BOOTLOADER ONTO THE FABDUINO USING YOUR FABISP

  • Connect your Fabduino to your USB with the FTDI cable and to your FabISP by soldering wires to the MISO/MOSI etc pin ports on the bottom edge of the Fabduino (see schematic)
  • Open your Arduino IDE program
  • Select Arduino Pro (3.3v, 8MHz) w/ATmega168 in the Tools > Boards menu
  • Select USBTinyISP in the Tools > Programmer menu
  • Click Burn Bootloader in the Tools menu - this should burn your Fabduino
  • Then Upload your program as normal!