let there be lights

So this was an interesting weekend, alternatively fustrating and productive, with lessons learned and progress made. I'm well on the way to a completed dome.

First off, as mentioned Thursday, my LED controllers and jumper wires showed up. So Friday after a long, frustrating day at work I sat down to try to program my Arduino Pro Mini with the standard Teeces sketch as found here. Now, I had originally thought to use a Pro Micro because it has the built-in USB, but it turned out that it's a little too big, with extra bits hanging over the side on both ends. Not a problem in and of itself once you adjust the pinouts in the code, but it did butt up against the screw-down terminals for the power connection, meaning it wouldn't be a snug fit in the socket. So I bit the bullet and got a mini and FTDI adapter at the local MicroCenter.

So if you haven't done one of these before, you basically go with a USB cable to a little PCB that is essentially a USB jack on one side and 5 or 6 pins on the other. Mostly 6 these days, which is good. You connect it to the pins on your Mini, and that dumps the code and all that down. Unfortunately, it would not work. I tried different computers, different serial drivers, different settings...all to no avail. I posted for help on the arduino forums, no help there. Saturday morning, I woke up, and went at it again...and I got it. My mistake? I had assumed the FTDI & Pro Mini should be both "right side up" when connected together, but the pinouts, upon closer examination, showed otherwise. I turned the Pro Mini upside down relative to the FTDI, and glory be. We have liftoff.

Once that happened, I dropped the LED controllers into their sockets and put a few test LEDs in without soldering. Bingo. Random flickerage. So after my volunteer shift I went to the makerspace and got to soldering on the Front Logic displays. There's two of them with 45 LEDs each. I'd already done the front and rear PSIs, which use nice big 5mm LEDs, but the 3mm for the rest of the displays were quite a different task. Lots of close, careful work.

A couple of times I messed up, getting solder in a hole before I could put an LED in. I learned two ways this weekend of dealing with that:

1. Use the tip of the iron to melt the solder and then give it a sharp rap on the table. This should jar it loose. Not recommended if you ahve delicate stuff soldered to the board already.
2. Poke at it with the component that needs to go in from one side, and heat it with the iron from the other. Then just ease the component in and solder it the rest of the way.

Anyway, Saturday and Sunday I did one front logic display each, and with the PSIs connected I had 4 out of 5 lights working. That's a total of 144 LEDs soldered. That just leaves the Rear Logic Display... 135 LEDs. Oy.

Funny thing. You may notice in the picture that the rear PSI is mostly yellow but has a little green. Sometimes on the PSIs, the color doesn't change all the way, just most of the way like that. I need to see if that's something people have been seeing before or what. In any case, I'm not too worried about it for now.

In the meantime, I glued in the holoprojectors to the dome. I tried using my super glue first, but it didn't last. Then I tried the glue gun today, but it was surprisingly ineffective. The owner of the makerspace said it was probably because I was using the small, low-temperature glue guns and to use one of the big high-temperature ones instead. That did the trick. At least, it has so far. So, another lesson learned. Oh, and I sanded off the paint from the bits where the glue was going, to give it something more to hang on to.

Anyway, got the word from the frame guy to send the balance. So I'll do that tomorrow if I can. Good timing, n'est-ce pas? And then tomorrow night I'll start to soldering the RLD. I'd like to have that done sometime this week so I can secure it and the battery pack (4xAA from Radio Shack) inside the dome. I still haven't added any kind of external switch; I'm waiting to see how the rest of the droid electronics pan out.  But in any case, I will have a fully done droid. Just gotta get a gear for turning it anddrop that in there, and I'm golden. Cool beans.