Output Devices Apr 17

Oy vey.  Some long hours in the fab lab this week have led to another successful, though not satisfying week.  Details to follow...

My task this week was to create an output device that when powered, gives off a visual display.  I eventually ended up making two boards, the hello.RGB which has an LED that changes colors, and the hello.array board which has a grid of 4x5 LEDs that go off in a pattern.  I was (barely) successful with the RGB and at this point have not gotten the array to work.

At first I had to mill the board(s).  At this point my entire plan was to do just the RGB.  I downloaded the traces and outline files from the FAB Academy server.  I printed with the milling machine, and in what's becoming a recurring problem, it froze several times.  The entire fab modules screen goes grey and nothing happens with the modella.

This can be "fixed" by either restarting the entire program or (as my colleague Brad showed me) by pausing the already frozen job on the modella, then restarting.  About 4 or 5 tries later and I had my board.  

To the soldering board (where a week off has led all my skills to diminish) and a while later I had my board.

Next, I attempted to program the board.  This is where the real troubles began and what should have been a few hour project spilled into days.  I have never once been able to get the boards working with my lap top so I went right to the desktop.  After plugging in the board, connecting to the fabISP, and powering it with a 9 volt, I attempted to flash the micro controller.  I got a familiar error:

"Failed Initialization... Double Check connections."  I've seen this before.  Usually I need to un-plug, re-plug in all the different connections.  I did pretty much every combination of wires every which way, and still got the same error.  Perhaps it was my connections.  I went back and cleaned up a few on the soldering board.  Same error.  I re-flowed all the solder.  Same error.  Frustrated something just wasn't working, and after several hours of trying with this one board, I decided to make another RGB board.  After milling (same slow, error-ridden process as before), and soldering, I hooked it up and lo and behold:  same error.  After changing all the wires all around, I actually got a different error for one of my 700 tries:

"Unable to read fuse properly."  Trying again right after that led right back to the connections error, and I never saw the fuse-read error again.  

Pretty frustrated at this point, I decided to try a completely different board.  Needing the practice with soldering, I decided to pick the hello.array board with the 4x5 grid of LED lights.

At this point in my narrative, you can pretty much take everything you've read so far above about the RGB and replace it with Array.  I milled, soldered, flashed, and got THE EXACT SAME ERROR MESSAGE.  Frustrating indeed.  

At this point there didn't seem like much else I could do.  I decided to go back one last time and try all the boards I had made.  First RGB, same error.  Second RGB....  success!?!  With no rhyme or reason, my hello.rgb just started working.  Look, light!

And another color!

What I like most about these pictures is their juxtaposition to the hello array board.  As if they are mocking that board, all up in its face, saying "Why don't you work, huh?!"  Perhaps too many hours in the fab lab has gotten me delusional.  Time to go home.  I'll consider this week a success, though I don't feel very good about the hours-put-in-to-final-product-working ratio.  I'll keep working on the array board until our next lecture so maybe I'll have a  lucky?  (it sure doesn't feel like skill) update soon.

UPDATE:  Array working!  I re-soldered some of the pieces and voila: It works.

As you can see there is one LED out but the rest work great.  I'll try to re-solder or replace that one, but I have to say that today has left me feeling much better than yesterday.