Week 10, output devices

For this week I decided to make a light array that turns on after a set amount of time when a button is pressed. Now you may notice that this is quite similar to week 12 (input devices) and that's because it is. This project could count for both weeks but I will go over more of the ‘input’ side of things on that week's documentation

The entire idea started with me thinking, “hmm, wouldn't it be funny if I make a device that blinds me every time I press a button? Hold on, isn't that kind of like a flashbang - the bang part? That's actually really funny, imma make that” and thus this incredibly stupid design was born. Back when I was working on some stuff using some on board circuit LEDs I noticed that the white ones are actually really bright so those are the ones I am going to use.

After making and testing a simple design in Tinkercad. I had a pretty good start going. I'm actually pretty proud of the way I did the LEDs, I was able to make it in a way so that the only resistor I would need is the pulldown one for the button (I am aware that it's in the wrong place but that's something i fixed on the circuit itself) By using both parallel and series LEDs I wouldn't need to use a resistor to prevent them from burning out!

With that made, I recreated the design in KiCad to make this

Then this,The actual final board plans. There were a few other iterations that i've made but they all didn't work (and I forgot to take pictures of most of them, whoops)

Actually making the board took a little longer than I wanted it to. To the right you see one of the failed boards, I done hecked up and didnt connect one of the LED line’s power supply. I had to manually connect them using some copper wick (which actually worked)

After many attempts and a fair amount of mental pain, I ended up with this, each row is controllable and it is very bright (I have blinded myself at least 15 times already.)I will go into the input side of things as well as the coding side of things on week 12.

Some things that I would have tried to do differently is where I have the LED power lines connected. I currently have them connected to digital pins but I think it would also be nice to have them be able to be controlled via analog. Currently the way it alerts you if the button is pressed is the middle row of LEDs flash very quickly. This works but I think a dim flash would also work.