Input Devices

For this week we were asked to make a board that was able to calculate some sort of input.

What is an Input device?

Any machine that feeds data into a computer. For example, a keyboard is an input device, whereas a display monitor is an output device. Input devices other than the keyboard are sometimes called alternate input devices. Mice, trackballs, and light pens are all alternate input devices.

I started to think about my final project and decided to use the step response examples that Neil has kindly shared with us. The codes and board layouts can be found here.

I then milled out the step response board and programmed it with the AVR programmer

 

I was having problems installing pyserial in my mac. i tried to install it in terminal and I get this error

Last login: Mon Nov 5 09:57:26 on ttys000
Guillermos-MacBook-Pro:~ gbernal$ cd Downloads/
Guillermos-MacBook-Pro:Downloads gbernal$ cd pyserial-2.6
Guillermos-MacBook-Pro:pyserial-2.6 gbernal$ python setup.py install
running install
running build
running build_py
running build_scripts
running install_lib
running install_scripts
changing mode of /usr/local/bin/miniterm.py to 755
running install_egg_info
Removing /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pyserial-2.6-py2.7.egg-info
error: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pyserial-2.6-py2.7.egg-info: Permission denied
Guillermos-MacBook-Pro:pyserial-2.6 gbernal$

then i try typing sudo

Guillermos-MacBook-Pro:pyserial-2.6 gbernal$ sudo python setup.py install
Password:
running install
running build
running build_py
running build_scripts
running install_lib
running install_scripts
changing mode of /usr/local/bin/miniterm.py to 755
running install_egg_info
Removing /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pyserial-2.6-py2.7.egg-info
Writing /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pyserial-2.6-py2.7.egg-info
Guillermos-MacBook-Pro:pyserial-2.6 gbernal$

I was missing some of the drivers that we had earlier installed. Luckly Dan pointed out that my error was caused by me not having the FTDI drivers. Once I installed the proper drivers, everything worked!