Baby Steps

Next Steps (oops!)

I through I would try making a stepper motor move. I picked up a small 12vdc one at Jarcar Electronics. Wired up my Ardunio board. I struggled a bit with the common and some of the electronic basics to be honest.

The board lit up, got hot then stopped working ... oh oh. Robbie is dead I suspect. Murdered with a jolt of electricity and it seems I have blood on my hands!

From there on in - I couldn't get even a simple piece of code to compile and upload via the USB. I think I cooked the card. They are supposed to be 'idiot proof' to about 20vdc, so I cant work out what I did wrong. I'm certain I had it right.

Anyway, long story short. I took it back to Jarcar and they replaced Robbies brain. 
I better be careful from here on in with him I guess.

A new board sits at about $40, but the chip is about $8 (with the bootloader (Robbies personality) pre-installed). So as long as I don't cook to many boards I'll be fine to experiment further. Hopefully the chip is the most significant point of failure.

Ok ... I'll give that motor a break for a while and work on Shift Registers. At least I can play with them at lower voltages. I decide at this point to grab some basic tools and a multimeter so I can test readings better.

I did quite a bit of reading on these IC's. They seem reasonably simple. Basically I can turn a limited number of Ardunio In's and Out's into many more - giving Robbie more eyes, arms and even more mouths effectively - he'll love it !. 

Even better I will be able to daisy chain the shift register chips together.Apparently the only contain will be the time it takes to send data signals between the 'latchpin' and 'clockpin' settings over many chips. But several shift registers or even a dozen or so does not seem to be a problem.
So I made up the Ardunio circuit (based on 8 bits and the 74HC595 IC), and used the example code - could I get it to work? ... No way! - Incidentally I've actually bought a second IC the same as I am keen to expand the number of registers I can access.



hmmmm...

I'm actually having real problems seeing the board (with my bad eyes), understanding some of the circuitry basics and getting my head around what some of the odd and inconsistent multimeter readings mean.

I think my approach going forward might to be go back to some really simple circuits and try and understand more of the basics.

I turn to a few basic electronics, Bit Math  and such online pages and do a lot of reading and experimentation.