Week 10 Output Devices

Summary

This week I learned how to create a PCP using a transistor and regulator to power a larger 1W diode and control it using the Arduino interface

Assignments

Group assignment

Measure the power consumption of your output device . I attempted to measure this with the multimeter but for some reason that neither me nor my instructor could figure out it didn't work correctly.

Individual assignment:

Add an output device to a microcontroller board you've designed and program it to do something.

For this week I decided to design a PCB that would be able to control a larger diode using a regulator and a transistor. I used the XIAO RP2040 microcontroller for this board.

The design was quite complex and I had to add a couple of 0 OHM resistors to connect the circuit completely.

Here is what the soldered version looks like connected to the computer through a USB C.

I then used the Blink example program in the Arduino software to blink the included LED to test the board and that worked.

Then to blink the larger diode I connected it using soldered wires and checked the pinouts so that it was connected correctly with the live wire and the ground to pin 1 and 2.

To blink the larger diode I then had to modify the program to identify the correct pin and I used Adrian Torres site to find the correct label for the pin in Arduino.

Then I changed the software to this

Where instead of the built in LED I changed that part of the program to pin nr 1 and then I was able to succesfully blink the light as can be seen in the hero video above.