Week 11
Apr 12: Input devices
List of task this week
Group assignment
To see the group assignment go here.
My thoughts on this week’s group assignment, Probe an input device's analog levels and digital signals: It was very interesting to see the signals on the oscilloscope, the maze game was made by a colleague of ours for a presentation I have been using it to show to a lot of mostly teenagers so it was fun to see even more how it worked.
Measure something: add a sensor to a microcontroller board
To see how to make a board in Kicad go here. The board I made only had two components, A SAM21 XIAO and a hall sensor. The hall sensor only needs tree pins, power, GND and a data pin, which I connected to pin 0. This week is input so I chose the hall sensor because it can detect if there is a magnet near. I made this simple board in Kicad and exported it to svg.
Because I was going to have the XIAO on feet I extended the blobs so it would be easier to solder, this can all be easily done in Inkscape, just have in mind that if when you are making it bigger on one side and it pulls all sides it is possibly stroke and we want it to be a path, so just select it, go to path and click stroke to path. I deleted the spots on the bottom of the XIAO since there was no need for them. I inverted the paths and made a frame to cut.
I milled out the files. To see how I mill out see the group page week 8.
I used a leftover board and a little bit of the old one got on it but it was fine. I soldered the feet and the hall effect sensor on and it worked right away, which was a first for a while so I
call that a win. I got the code from this site.
I spent so much time trying to get the board from week 8 to work that I had to make something simple to try to catch up.
