The assignment for this week is to measure something: add a sensor to a microcontroller board that you've designed and read it.
More challenges with electronics and programming. I am learning a lot using Eagle but programming is really a mystery to me.
I chose Neil's hello.load.45. I modified it using Eagle. I started by dropping all the same components that were on Neil's board. I labelled and connected the components.
I exported my schematic to a board. I used the autoroute function and then adjusted the components to give myself more room to solder. I milled and cut the board using the Modela.
I soldered the board at home with a portable soldering station that I borrowed from Lorain County Community College.
Scott suggested That I create a capacitance sensor using copper foil. I cut four squares of copper foil and soldered them to ribbon wire. I connected that to my hello.load.45 board.
Using python and the hello.load.45.py program, I programmed the board.
Neil's board:
My board:
My finished product:
Struggles
This was a challenge for me. It took me several weeks to create, solder and program these two components.
I do not enjoy the electronics part of this class and we seem to do A LOT of electronics. I am not sure how this will apply to my new job as an art and design instructor in a STEM school with young children, but who knows?
Constantly feeling overwhelmed by the demands of the program. It is so difficult to keep up!
Originally not getting my board to work. Upon REALLY close inspection, we found that two of the legs of my processor were "floating" above the pad. Easy fix by adding more solder.
Persistence and Success
Designing the board was not difficult. I am enjoying the soldering and am getting pretty good at it.
Programming the board is more difficult for me. I really have to follow the steps that I write down. I am sure that with practice, this will get easier
After programming, waving my hand over the foil sensors makes the bars on the screen move. Way cool!
Design Steps To Follow:
Connect the ISP board to the Hello.Load.45 board through their 2x3 headers. Making sure that you have the pins around the right way and the ground and VCC match up.
Plug the mini usb onto the circuit board and plug into computer.
Use the FTDI cable to provide power to the circuit board. My board is in the lower left of the picture.
Follow the steps to program the circuit -cd helloload which changes the directory to where I put helloload. Then-sudo make. This makes a hex file and defines rules. Interestingly,
we couldn't find the files that the program made but we continued. I entered my password which sent it to the board.Then sudo make program-avrisp2.
Now the board is programmed. The next step is to run python to get the circuit to show me a gui. I had to give the command sudo python hello.load.45.py/dev/ttyUSB0.
The program loaded. Now when you wave your hand over the foil sensors, the amount of light is measured and reflected on the bar graphs on the computer screen.
