09 Output Devices
This week's assignment is to measure the power consumption of an output device and add an output device to a microcontroller board you've designed and program it to do something.
Group assignment: Output Devices
The documentation for our group assignment from the Barcelona node can be found here.
Lessons Learned
- it's a beauty to navigate data sheets, hard to find fast what you really need for polulu devices
- we could not really explain the difference in sensitivity, which would need further in-depth investigation
A development board to power a neopixel strip 2.0
This week I continued my quest to create a board that could control a neopixel strip for my final project and which I was able to program with MAC.
"Frankie"
Since I wanted to understand my mistakes I made on the board during Electronics Design Week I continued using it and created a "Frankenstein".
In general I had misread the pinout during the design of this PCB and ignored to double-check when doing the schematics. I had connected the UPDI to the wrong pin 9 instead of 10. So I had to scratch the connection and connect to pin 10. It was easier to do so using one of the pinheader pins since there was more space for the wire. Second mistake was that I had simply not created any connection to the button. I solved that with a wire from pin 04 to the resistor. And third but not least I had RX connected to RX and TX to TX for the serial connection, instead of RX-TX and TX-RX.
A SAMD programmer to program ATTiny from MAC
In the past week I encountered that I could not program the ATTiny with MAC, but eventually I could not program it using MAC and the Quentorres. Thus I used the fab UPDI programmer instead.
Thanks
- switched to Windows again
- used another SAMD programmer instead of the Quentorres
- checked my soldering with the multimeter
- resoldered some of the connections
- took off the LED
- changed the voltage regulator!! (which was simply the wrong component in the right box) and it worked
After burning the boatloader I could start testing my board on MAC.
Connect the Neopixel Strip
As with the blink program for LED I started with the strandtest.ino to simply try if the neopixel strip would lite up. Which it did not... I received an error that The clock was not set at the right speed.
after changing the clock to 16 Mhz which the Neopixelstrip requires nothing changed.
I reset the board and checked the connections in Arduino but no success. After I googled and found that on the arduino forum some people had the same issue and used a different library instead:
tinyNeopixel part of the ATTinyCore library. So I installed the library included it
in my code and ran another strandtest without any success.
Eventually I asked to
Program the Neopixel Strip
Lessons Learned
- if you change the clock of a microcontroller you need to burn the bootloader again