a fun ladyada tutorial- 3 leds

3 leds light  ups in all sorts of configurations. I was not able to catch all the different configurations on photos but here are a few.

2 leds on, 1 led off

leds light up on after the other

leds all light up at the same time

3 leds

 

 

3 leds light up one after the other

 

 

Filed under: tutorials I tried

My Waveshield disaster

Well, I decided I wanted to use sound for my little project. I want to replicate the little bird that sings from an earlier post.

I am going to make an animal in papercraft and when you walk by it, the animal will make a sound ( a cow will mooh, a frod will croak and so on…) I haven’t decided which animal yet.I got the PIR motion sensor but am missing a part, still to arrive.

The Wavershield, which would provide the sound, arrived and I unpacked with great excitement only to realize it did not come assembled.  I had to put it together. I needed to solder it. I had never soldered. I read through some tutorials and a student from my class helped me. I soldered an LED to a line and it went well. This would be fine- oh how wrong I was!

I followed ladyada’s brilliant instructions. After all, how hard could this be, it did say a beginner, such as myself, could do it.

This is what a properly assembled Waveshield looks like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is my kit, post disaster. You can’t yet see all my mistakes.

Topf of my board post-disaster:

Bottom of my board post-disaster:

Disaster 1:

I had to start by soldering the by soldering the SD card to the board.  The bottom right corner was a huge problem as you can see from the blob.This took 30 minutes and multiple failed attempts to use to solder sucker which lead to melting and remelting the solder in exactly the same place. I think I melted part of the board. See below, if you’re not squeamish!

Disaster 2:

Soldering all the resistors, the ceramic capacitor, as well as the other capacitors, the DAC,  the operational-amplifier, the 3.3 regulator ICI, the reset button and the ICSP header,and then the three electrolytic capacitors. This would be the end for me.  The third electrolytic capacitor needed to go in C9 on the board. However, as you can see below, C9 on my board was occupied by the soldered ceramic capacitor.

Yup, nothing I could do from now on…

Conclusion:

I have to reorder the parts and start from scratch! On the bright side, I now can solder somewhat properly….

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Filed under: final project, tutorials I tried

one problem begats another…

I tried to do the CIRC-05 circuit and programming. So far it is still not working.

See the failed attempt below.

Filed under: tutorials I tried