Embedded Programming

Let there be light

After extensive programming issues, I was finally able to make my light turn on... pressing the button would turn it off. While I'm not sure how my experiment turned out completely backwards, I am happy nonetheless. I'll probaby try to claim it was in fact on purpose for morse code, for people who are afraid of the dark, for people protesting their energy bill, etc.

Throughout this process I realized how very easy it was to screw things up. The smallest mistake could hinder the programming process. In fact, I had more than one small mistake, I had made a couple significant ones.

First and foremost, I was missing an entire link between my microcontroller and ISP. To fix this I soldered a wire on to the board to circumvent the other paths.

I also realized that my design incorporated quite a few mistakes in the 'linking' process. It was a learnign experience for me to follow the 'lines' in eagle... since the labeling of the individual pins wasn't clear. After resoldering and cutting off some paths with an exacto knife, I went back to programming, but hit another issue. We thought it was the 'bit rate' but really it was me not realizing that I had to change usbtiny to avrisp2. After many trips back and forth to the shop and meeting with many peoople, I finally moved on to the next step: making light.

let there be light: