Super Sweet Solar Sensors!

 How many LED's will one solar sensor power? ALMOST 4 however I am also doing this in NC and its snowing, so not the sunniest ever. Will have to test he difference when Im back in FL.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10153528570660206&l=695006173644412131
*video link

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10153541841000206&l=5987659562836661246
*video link  playing with possible set ups

Sound of Victory

The fresh batteries worked! More than enough to power 2 motors at full speed. I'm not sure how many I could add- the full 12 may be too much for those batteries, but we shall have to see. Always have 9V batteries if we need it!

I'm shocked that I had a hypothesis for troubleshooting and it actually worked.

Servo Motors- Problem with Power

This video shows the "twitch action" made possible by my revised code:

The old code no longer worked for no reason I could indentify, but this one works better anyway.

I used this tutorial (thanks Katerie!) to hook up the battery pack and servo motor the right way.

Now, this photo shows proof that the battery pack IS providing power, at least enough for the LED to light up very brightly. What does not show is that the motor does NOT move when connected to just the batteries. They must not be providing enough power; I am thinking one or more of the batteries is dead. They started to smell funny too after a while, I'm dead serious about that. I also plugged in BOTH the ardunios 5V and the battery pack, which nuked the LED nicely and turned on the single servo motor, but not two servo motors.

The solution is probably to get fresh batteries or even a 9V battery. Unfortunately, no more AA batteries or 9V batteries are left in the storage room. Tomorrow I will bring in my own AA batteries and see if that fixes it. If this finally works I will be done working with servo motors for this project, besides some tweaking of code to allow for more motors and slightly different behaviors. 

Working on coding/tech for project

Ok so I used the SERVO MOTOR SHEILD, because having 16 servo motors at once for our project would be, well, balling. But the reference for this thing and the way in which you must translate PWM into angles is so confusing that I'm about to give up on the servo motor shield. It barely works running on example code, and worst of all, there is NOTHING on the internet about it, giving me far too little code to "borrow." Probably a failure. It's so confusing. I feel like a 5th grader in math class again who is struggling with the creeping idea that she is indeed a very ignorant individual and has been all along. I am also exceptionally bad at soldering and seem to just get worse at it every time.

HOWEVER, It did show me the value of using an outside power source for motors. That was basically my issue all along, duh. I think I may be able to use regular code for less, but still a few, motors.

Here is some altered example code that gets a motor to twitch randomly, must to the same effect Casey's rangefinder code USED to have when it worked. If I add some more delay to this, I think it can provide an interesting "buggy" motion for some of the smaller bugs, or perhaps moving parts.

Here's my plan for the parts layout:

LIGHTS: Long breadboards with a COUPLE of 74H etc binary counters, allowing MANY lights to be controlled at once. I think only one or two of these will be connected to the rangefinder. The rest will have some random blinking going on. Yes, I need to code this, but I figure LEDS are on a lower difficulty level than motors and I already have a lot going on with them anyway. Also, some of those cute TINY breadboards can be installed inside larger bugs for LOTS of light.

MOTORS: Long breadboards with many motors powered by battery or wall power source. Controlled by codes that creates twitchy movements, possibly control bugs or even bug parts like "wings."

NEXT STEPS:

-Code random light action
-Refine random motor code
-DESIGN BUGS! I'm totally uninspired about what these buggers will look like because the technical stuff consumes me so much. I need to figure out WHAT these bugs will look like and how I can use the sensors to make them more interesting, as well as surface alterations.

Okay, it works!

Got the NFC/RFID working, so all is well. It reads the cards and gives the UID for each tag. Previously blogged issue is nothing... just had to switch to 115200 baud so the characters display.

Now to figure out how to write to these and make it so they each do something.

Working on the RFID Shield

Soldered everything for both the wave shield and the RFID/NFC shield. Plugged it in, LEDs are on. BUT! The text is... this. More to come tomorrow!!!

Chapter 14

Chapter 9

Chapter 12

LED Matrix, project 20

This didn't really work out like it should have, and I might not get any credit for it but I did try. I'm sort of proud that I managed to get it to do much at all, and I was short on supplies and time...

For what it is worth, here's what was managed.

LED Matrix (aka wired chaos)

diode testing

pot dim led

Motor and servo projects

Sonic Sensor

skycraft