Friday, July 8, 2011
Still working on the GPS Code
I'm still working on parsing the NMEA messages that come from the GPS. I wrote a little String Tokenizer to help with that.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
GPS Code
This is a much less exciting set of pictures! Sorry about that! I'm working on writing the code to parse the NMEA Messages (the text from the last post) that come from the GPS.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
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!!
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!!
Monday, July 4, 2011
Sunday, July 3, 2011
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