Posts Tagged "arduino"

I’m Seeing Double Here: Four LED Strips!

I have to confess – the first time I pressed the switch and saw this working, I started giggling uncontrollably. This is all fairly rudimentary electronics wiring, but I continue to feel lucky every time things just work – and also lucky that my components aren’t exploding in a small burst of flame and smoke.

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Uno > Nano

In trying to imagine moving my project into a physical container (box), the Arduino Uno itself is a bit bulky. I’ve been trying to figure out how to shrink the footprint down more, and ultimately decided to switch things over to an Arduino Nano (technically a Nano Every).

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Button and Display Test

I haven’t affixed the lid yet to the top of the box, and wanted to see how things fared in the spaces I made. So I decided to hook up the display and buttons.

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Building a Box

As part of my Arduino project, I plan on enclosing it within a box. I’m somewhat at a stage now where I actually need the box, so I was working on that a bit tonight. Got a few basic pieces of wood from Home Depot to experiment with.

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Fritzing

I’m torn on this step, because right now I feel like I’m procrastinating. I think it’ll be good to actually document my setup… and I think it’ll also help to share my design with others, because I’m positive I’m doing tons of things wrong. Or at a minimum, I have lots of opportunities for refinement.

What I should be doing now is transferring things to a Perma-Proto board, and to start figuring out how to enclose all this stuff into an actual, honest to goodness box.

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Adding a Power Switch

This whole setup needs to be smaller (small enough to fit in a jewelry box), so there’s definitely more refactoring in my future.

But that’s like me wanting to improve my kitchen production line, when I’m just happy that I baked a cake that tastes very cake-like, and doesn’t kill anyone. Improvements to come, but they’re coming later.

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A Literal Test Drive

Before running some errands tonight, I decided to throw my Arduino project into a box, hook up a 9V battery to it, and take it along for a test drive. On our drive.

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A Momentary Victory

Relocated wires, and tried to “clean up” a bit. This isn’t code, but definitely feels like refactoring. Might even be able to get away with a half-size breadboard.

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Second Solder

This was incredibly daunting, as there were 16 pins in total. And though they’re spaced out just like everything else I’ve soldered… these seemed closer together. A trick of the mind, but I was sweating something awful as I stepped through each pin.

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First Solder

I’m not gonna lie: I’ve been sweating this part of the project. I’ve never soldered anything before, and the prospect of burning electronics (or myself) with a length of hot metal has made me… apprehensive, to say the least.

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New Supplies

This has been an interesting project. Super slow, high learning curve. But I’d like to think that once I figure out how things should all work, I can create several/multiple versions with ease.

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Dusting Off an Old Project

Funny thing – I was explaining to Liz my frustration with all the setup. It’s like having a pencil, but then finding out it doesn’t work. It should work, because it’s a pencil! But for some reason it doesn’t.

And then it works, but only in one room (but not another). Why? I could see updated data via the Serial Monitor when running the Arduino IDE, but couldn’t see any data via the Serial Monitor when running VSCode. Gah.

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Connecting All the Things

I got a larger breadboard to work with, and was able to place my components together in what seemed like a coherent setup. The LCD wiriing was always a little crazytown, but add to that four more jumper wires for the GPS module… and this thing looks like a miniature bomb.

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Arduino + VS Code

The way Arduino code works, there are two main functions: setup() and loop(). Setup is run once at the start, and loop is run continuously… well, forever. Add this to the fact that I really don’t know C++ at all, and it makes for some gnarly code. At least for now, in my first passes.

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