Another hard week where I wish I had paid more attention to that electrical engineering class I took 14 years ago. Played some catch-up from Week 5, but still have more to do.
Remilling the fish board
If you remember from Week 5, I found out pixels matter when milling from a PNG and also that I am not great a soldering. So I remilled my board and restuffed it. I still had some hard times with soldering the 45 pins, and got some practice with the copper braid. A trick is that I learned is to put some solder on the braid itself before applying it to the board. This helps transfer heat to the braid more quickly.
Working on my Embedded Programming
Since I was in the navy and my board looks like a fish. I thought I would write a code that flashes back in morse code what you type into it. Since morse code is more easily understood through hearing, I would use one led light for dots and one for dashes. The dot would light up for 1/3 of a second and the dash would light up for almost a full second. If you click the picture below you can download my attempt at coding it into C. As you will see below, I did not get to loading it and debugging the code. I have never programmed in C. And I am only passable at programming in python. I was hoping to eventually program the board to also go the other way. Accept morese code from the button, play it on the leds, and print it to the terminal. But never got there.
Still catching up
I had my USB programmer from Week 3. But I had yet to fully load the USBTiny programmer on there. I messed with going through and downloading all the Windows AVR softwares per Brian's page. But it just was not working. So I used the linux machine with the Atmel bootloader attached in the architecture shop. Followed Brian's page again closely. Making sure to change the atmelice in the make file. But it looks like my USB board had some hardware issues. Even though it loaded the software, the computer was not reading the USB stick when plugged in. To push on, thankfully Rodrigo from my section let me borrow an extra USB part that he milled but had yet load. I was able to sucessfully go through the whole process with his USB stick.
And a short...
So it turns out I am still crappy at soldering. It also may be because I am still using that screen shot file and need to relook at exporting an SVG from KiKad. So when I went to load load my program to the board, the FTDI cable would dissapear from the list of attached USBs everytime I hooked up the fish. I used a voltmeter and saw that the voltage reading from VCC to Ground went from 5V to about 0.04V. After a long day, I will have to push this battle to another week.
