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Input Devices

March 30th, 2011

Stuffing

The milling of the boards went pretty well. One (or actually multiple) huge mistake I made while stuffing did set us back about 4 hour though. It turnes out that I placed all but one of the ATTiny45's upside down which resulted in a lot of smoke while plugging them in.

After confirming that the ATTiny's where upside down, I removed all the molten chips and replaced them with new ones (right side up this time). A quick test of all the boards showed that, luckily, I hadn't made any other mistakes while soldering.

Programming

This is where the real trouble began. It took me days to figure out how to install Pyserial and use the Makefiles correctly.
Another huge problem was that I was trying to use rx.py to see if the "Switch" board was working. I was not aware that rx.py was not a program for that since it was on the FabAcademy website under "Switch" with the rest of the firmware. Very confusing.

A late succes!

After figuring out that rx.py was NOT software for one of the boards, I programmed the "Sound" board to test if it would work with the provided software. Since my Mac doesn't show the FTDI cable in "ls /dev" for some reason, we used Ubuntu on Frosti's laptop. The program and board with microphone worked immediatly! Too bad this was while today's Fab Academy had already started and we couldn't test the other boards.

Update: For future references: install the drivers before you try to do anything... that is all.

Funny

One last funny thing we just found out: If you plug the microphone board in a Windows 7 computer and let it install the firmware on it's own, Windows 7 will think you plugged in a mouse. Shouting in the microphone will move your cursor!