This week on embedded programming it go me excited to rev up for the final project push. This week I decided to build upon the idea of my week 4 board. During week 4 I made the button and LED in series meaning that the button when pressed would allow the LED to light, although this week I am putting the buttom on one digital pin, and the LED on another. I am doing this because I am going to use embedded programming to make the LED to some fun things. Using arduino code I am able to tell when the button is being pressed then, execute a script to control the LED.

Building the board

I took inspiration from my week 4 board, using the D11C as the chip. After putting importing all the components into my eagle schematic I tried to make the board. I tried to be as clever as possible with this board instead of copying what I had during week 4. A couple things I looked into were vias, and using different size airwires in order to make the board compact. This had varying degrees of success. For the vias I asked Rob about how that would work on a single sided board. The idea was that if I made a via like I normally would in the schematic, once the board was cut, I would be able to use a wire to connect the vias closing the loop. The reason I wanted to do that was to minimize the clutter of using 0 ohm resistors. The second tactic of changing the size of the airwires. This worked well in some cases but not for others. Some parts had wide enough. holes to route wires through but only if I decreased the size of the airwire. I went all the way down to 10 in order to fit some wires. Some tipes for better control of the airwires is to lower the grid size, this helps move things with more precision.

Braiding

This time when I was soldering the parts onto the board I made much fewer mistakes. And even when I did put more solder than I wanted, I was able to use the braid to remove the pieces skillfully.

1. Get a piece of the braid
2. Put an unscathed part of the braid on top of the area which you want to take solder away
3. Take solder iron and put it on the back of the braid to heat it up
4. Lift away from the soldered area you want to remove from

Programming

In my schematic I used the wrong 5x2 pin header for my programmer. So I used Caine Ardayfio's genious idea of a converter between the two 5x2 pin headers. After using the programmer to allow the D11C to be programmed. I went into arduino to code the the button. I was able to make the button do a bunch of fun things such as blinking and fading up and down using basic coding priciples such as far loops and if statements.