First Full Arduino Update

I hope you have been enjoying the pictures that I've been posting! Now to give a little more information about them! The first day I was getting the Arduino development environment set up and running some of the test sketches (A sketch is the name that Arduino uses for a program. It's the unit of code that is uploaded to and run on an Arduino board).

I stared out by blinking an LED and reading a button press so I decided to put those together and change the color of my common cathode tri-color led on a button press. I wired each of the anodes to a digital pin on the Arduino and rotated the active output each time the button was pressed.

The next day I decided to take this one step further and learn how to use the analog inputs. I used three 10K ohm potentiometers that were tied from +5V to ground and took the sweeper output and fed that into an analog input on the Arduino. I had one of these for each color and used the value I read from them to adjust the duty cycle of the colors in the LED in order to mix them to create any color you want.

Then I decided to try to get the LCD working. The code for this was really straight forward since someone has written a really nice library that takes care of all of the nitty gritty details but I had a lot of trouble getting it wired correctly. Thankfully Arduino is open source and has a very large development community! So after spending a long time struggling to make sense of the pinouts on my own I was able to find a really nice step by step guide to getting the LCD wired up complete with pictures from Ada Fruit! (Lady Ada is my hero!)

For the last project of the week I decided to try a more design centric project. My goal was to use the ability of the LCD to display special characters to create a set of numbers that filled both rows of the display. I found out that the LCD can only accept 8 special characters before it's memory is full and then it just starts overwriting the earlier characters. I spent a long time trying to get the parts that I needed down to only 8 characters and was not able to so I decided to cheat and use Google. A quick search showed that this is not possible and that the only successful "Bug Number" fonts are based on numbers that are 3x3 instead of 2x2. I still think there should be a way to do it by reprogramming the special characters before printing each number, but I don't know how slow that would be. I am going to shelve that project for now and move on to others that will help me learn more.

Keep checking back as I will continue to post pictures every day with a full description every week of this challenge!!