Arduino is Hard!

This challenge has not been going well at all! When I chose to do it I thought to myself, "it's only a couple of hours a day!" But it turns out that I don't have a couple of hours a day on a regular basis! I am still making plans and working out the details for the aquarium light but it's much slower going than I could have imagined!

Schematic and PCB Layout

Wow, that last pictured sucked!

Wow, that last picture of the schematic sucked! Sorry about that! Here's a better one and a picture of the power supply I'm going to use!

Aquarium Lights

Arduino Update

This week started out strong! I got the GPS hooked up after only a little trouble (it's amazing what having the right pin-out will do for you!) and I was able to print the raw NMEA message through the Serial Monitor. It was pretty much downhill from there. I am having quite a bit of trouble using the data that I get from the GPS. I can read the messages using a software serial implementation or through the actual hardware serial port and print it out but anytime I try to parse it and use it for anything it just completely stops updating. I started out using a software serial implementation and using String::substring() to get the parts of the messages but that was really ugly and didn't work so I wrote a String Tokenizer using strtok which also didn't work. The next thing I tried was to switch to using the hardware serial port and tweaking my StringTokenizer and that works some of the time. I don't know if there is an error in my code that crashes the Arduino or what! I have been working on it for the last four days so I think I may just move on to something new and come back to this! I got my USB Host Shield so I am going to try to get that working tonight with my Nexus S.

Still struggling with the GPS

Look what came in the mail today!