how to make (almost) anything

Networking

Week 11 Tools/Resources:
Eagle
Roland SRM-20 Mill
Soldering Equipment
Arduino IDE

HTM: Akash Badshah

For networking week, I wanted figure out some of the basic functionality I'll need for my final project, which is to use capacitive touch to control the brightness of LEDs. My goal was to have a basic understanding of the design for a capacitive touch strip, and to network that to the LED button board from Week 5, allowing for the touch strip to control the LED's brightness. This also meant having to dive into writing the code for this, which is definitely the area at this point that I'm the most in the dark about. Various levels of success were achieved.

Capacitive Touch Strip

Based on my conversation with Alex from EECS during input devices week, I knew that a touch strip could work similarly to Matt Blackshaw's touchpad project. Luckily, during subsequent research for the final project, I ran across Akash Badshah's design for a touch slider/code (also based on Matt's work), meant to control the volume of his final project, the FabBlaster. This was incredibly helpful, and I redrew/fabricated Akash's board, uploaded his code, and tested the board successfully.

So many numbers

With that, I moved on to trying to piece together the code I needed to get the strip networked successfully to the button board. C is starting to kind of (maybe) make some sense (maybe). I started with the basic button code with the hope that I could use it to control the brightness of that board's LED, and I was able to study Akash's code for the strip/have a rough understanding of the general and important decisions he made there. I also found other C examples of capacitive/LED functionality, but nothing that was networking two processors. I did my best to splice what seemed like the appropriate information into the button board code so that it uses the output from the touch strip to drive the status of the LEDs. It was a wild stab in the dark. And when I tried to compile it in Arduino IDE, I got this error:

Darn.

Hmm... I'm clearly a bit in over my head at the moment in the orogramming department, and this no doubt will take a longer period to sort through than just this week for me. Glad I started now...