Academy 2013
Output Devices

output6
My screen in a box
 I had a lot of fun in the output week. I milled out all the circuit boards in the week before the Academy so I could spend more time programming the boards.

hello.lcd

My favorite project this week was to make a LCD screen. I began soldering the board and than I had to solder the screen to it. I looked at Neils video to see how the wires where connected to the board and followed that.

Here are the wires soldered to the screen

output1

Now I had to program the board and wrote in the terminal
         ~/Desktop/hello.lcd$ sudo make -f hello.LCD.44.make
         ~/Desktop/hello.lcd$ sudo make -f hello.LCD.44.make program-avrisp2

Here is the screen not working

output2

After that I got an error and had no idea why it came up. After few seconds I noticed that I had forgotten to plug the battery on the board so it wasn't getting any power. After I did that everything went fine on the board and on the screen appeared the text "Hello to the world". That meant that the program was running fine. Now I ran the .c file and wrote: 
         gedit hello.LCD.c

In there I changed the text from "Hello to the world" to "Velkomin í Fab Lab" witch means "Welcome to Fab Lab". This project was suppose to be a good example of what people can make in Fab Lab when the come in for the first time.
Hello to the world!

output

Velkomin í Fab Lab

output45

To make it more friendly I thought of putting the screen in a box. I made the box in inscape and had two rooms in it, one for the battery and one for the circuit board. To make the hole for the screen I found the size of it on this datasheet.
I then raster in the laser cutter the Fab Lab log on it and made holes for the battery wire.

The screen comfortably placed in the box

output5

Here are the walls of the box

output7  output8

Here is the battery in the top shelf

output9

Now I was not happy that every time I wanted to show this to people I had to open the box and connect the battery so my next idea was to put a switch on the board. That was a lot easier than I thought. I had a slide switch that I connected to two wires. I then cut one of the wires in the battery snap and connected the new wires from the switch to them. This meant that the electricity from the battery had to go through the switch before going to the board. Then I had to laser cut a hole in the box for the switch. I looked at this datasheet for the slide switch to find out the size of it and cut a hole in the box.
Here is the slide switch connected to the battery snap

output12  output

Here is the switch in place

output13


hello.RGB

I made this hello.RGB board after I did the screen. RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue which are the colors that the board makes. I programmed the board the same way I programmed the screen and I got the light shining. I'll have to give myself more time to change the codes for it.
hello.RGB

output14

 hello.stepper

I made the unipolar hello.stepper motor few weeks ago. After I soldered the board and programmed it the motor just vibrated in circles instead of turning more consistently. I asked Neil last week and he told me that the motor was not connected right. I haven't found time to dig in to that but that will defiantly be my next project here in Fab Lab.

I also soldered some other output devices but I had to stop making them because we didn't have all the objects for the boards.

Here are some pictures of the stepper motor

output17   output15

output16


  

fablab
Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland