T3h B1gg3st N000b. Me. Spent a week trying to figure out what was wrong with my circuit and code. The microcontroller was not responding, so that really worried me and Khor. We went through the data sheets countless number of times, trying to find a clue to what went wrong.
Then Khor found it. A misplaced wire. Mclr, which was supposed to be tied to a HIGH, was tied LOW. And guess who set the circuit up? Me. /cry. We weren’t set back by that much though, but this means we won’t get to present our circuit on a PCB. Ah well, a veroboard will work as well.
Been busy these past few days, relaxing only by going for the cross-realm battlegrounds in WoW. At least honor farming is much easier now… not to mention fun ;)
Saw this headlines today on Star Online.
Lol… the transport minister caught in a traffic jam had to defer a meeting with MAS. At least he didn’t use the ‘police escort’ privilege that many ministers (imo) abuse. Should at least light a bulb in his head that our KL’s traffic system is kinda lacking and would need improvements :) *cough* Federal highway *cough*
Ironic at it’s best.
It’s worrying me. 4 weeks into the semester and the circuit has not been built yet. Graeme sort of set us the pace by asking us to play around and familiarise ourselves with the components, but I feel the time PLAYING around with the components is a bit too… scary. Anyway, we decided to understand how the components work by the end of this week, and hopefully get a circuit up and running by the end of next. We also decided to use the simplest (and most device intensive, i.e, expensive) circuit for the time being. After getting a working circuit, we could then do a major overhaul on reducing the components needed, and crack our heads on the software part. Drawback of a simple circuit: Blardy hard to write software code.
After burning two 7-segment displays, I got the displays to count up by using the PIC to control the output. We also suspect the ADC is also fried. ^_^” Well, this goes without saying since we just slapped on the voltages and the inputs without reading through the datasheet properly first. Gonna test the ADC again tomorrow. Hope it works.
Till next time.
Fell sick yesterday. Actually, it was on Tuesday night that I felt unwell. Caught a cold i think. Lucky I had Mei Yen around to help me cook porridge and get medicine for me.
Design lab is going on well, I think. Not much progress, but we’ve learnt how to program the microcontroller. All that’s left is to wire up the sensor to the ADC, and the BCD to the display. After that we can wire it up to the microcontroller. I suggested that we program the PIC in conjunction with the wiring up so we would know how the data will move. A lot of minor things that we have to take into consideration since they all add up to one big problem later if we don’t.
Luckily for me, my laptop has a serial port. The microprocessor programmer needs to interface with the comp through a serial port, and I was worried that I can’t work from home. At least now I know I can bring my laptop over to the labs, program stuff, and bring it back home to tweak around with when the lab closes. The programming of the microcontroller can be done using a Jaycar programming kit and a computer with MPLAB. MPLAB is a free software, downloadable from http://www.microchip.com/ . Just look up MPLAB IDE and it should direct you to a list of possible links. It should be the first link. They also provide you with guides on how to use MPLAB. The programming is very low level though, something along the lines of VHDL, so be prepared to change your mindset if you’re a high level language programmer. :)
Got my design lab sepcifications yesterday. My project partners are Khor and Daniel. A pretty interesting project that we’ve been allocated to, the Digital Thermometer, which converts Analogue sensing of temperatures and converts it into digital values to be displayed on two 7-segment displays.
An online logbook has been set up by Khor, and for those who would like to keep track of what we are doing, visit http://dl22a.blogspot.com/Â :)
I might post up a personal logbook of my own on this blog, probably not a very detailed one, but it should contain those breakthroughs and progress that we make.
Till next time…
