Arduinome First Full Test from JP Sykes on Vimeo.

Finally managed to sort out all the bugs. The Arduinome is now fully functional. Now we move onto creating the enclosure.

More videos here.

OK, super weird additional findings – boy this is a lot of fun

So I got my proper 16 pin IDC cables today, which I hooked up and now my duff column is working. But this seems to have exposed some awesome craziness. Now if I got into arudinonme serial and do the test, I get them all lite up – woot I said. Then I noticed that in my monome test that was in the background I was getting crazy button presses being fired. Not touching anything, but with monome test set to toggle, as I start lighting up leds eventually I hit critical mass and monome test starts fireing button presses and led’s start turning off.

Out of curiosity I also fired up nerdscroll to see if my mirror issues was still occuring and it is.

Which made me look again at the break off board.

It seems I have the LED lights pin set upside down (the top one of the pair the one with the sets of 4 wires connecting to it..

I have mine…

bottom top…
8 – 1
16 – 9

Whereas looking at the diagrams again, I think it’s supposed to be

bottom top
1 – 8
9 – 16

I’m assuming I can’t fix that with turning the cable round since that will make the left and right sides switched as well.

So tomorrow evening I will resolder the break off panel and try again.

As much as it’s still buggy, I do feel closer than I was 2 hours ago. At least now all the lights light up.

(please excuse the awful quality video, the lighting here is bad, and I’m using a cheap flip video – better videos to come)

The last row that won’t light up. I tried to poking around. If I have it set so every led is on, that row dosn’t light up. if I short out tat rows 2 pins on the 4 pin ribbon (that’s LED-GND3 and SWT- GND3 the row lights up. If I short out SWT GND3 and LED GND4 next to it the row alos lights up. I can’t see any shorts and the joints seem sound all the way up to the shield.

Does this indicate anything to anyone?

Using the monome test, with the arduinomeserial running, I can now get handshakes going on. Press a button, the monome test recognises it, press the test cell to light a led and up it comes.

I do however still have a problem column. That right hand column (which I think is actually the bottom one maybe). It still doesn’t light on power up and the scrolling horizontals. And now I’m getting 1 or both led’s in the column dimly light and flicker gently when you light one from another column.

I’ve fiddled around and pulled and pushed, poked at it with a meter – but quickly came to the conclusion I have no idea what I need to be looking at.

Is there any indication from the above whether this is a board, a board edge wiring, a break off or a sheild issue?

What are the best trouble shooting steps once you get to this stage. I’m assuming I should be able to meter test A & B and that will show whether I have a short at point X.

I’m going to dedicate as much time as possible this weekend to getting this thing running – that and try and work out how to make a quick and easy temporary front panel maybe just using a sheet of ply with the correct squares drilled – need to find a decent template for that, which I think I saw the other day on the monome forums.

Been a while, apologies for the delay – got caught up in some chaos on another project (usernamecheck.com and it’s 100,000 visitors since it launched).

Anyway, back to this project. I finished the soldering today. At least finished until I need to fix all the bits that are buggy and broken.

I’ve managed to get to a point where I can get a horizontal (or vertical I guess) scrolling pattern. I was able to do all the serial name setting in XP in Parallels (more on that to come). It now shows up in “profiler” in OSX as the correct name, etc. Originally all the lights would come on, but I was matching in with in and out with out, but I think I was supposed to match in to out and vica versa – that is what I have now and I get the scrolling – which seems positive.

I can’t however see the arduinome in arduino serial or weirdly enough in the arduino client. It’s just not showing up under the devices – I just get all the bluetooth ones. More fiddling around tomorrow, I feel like I’m just trying stuff right now without even knowing what it might do – which is dangerous.

After desoldering the whole thing and doing my best to clean out all the solder from the holes. I was still stuck with slightly obstructed access. Taking two cat5 wires and twisting the ends wasn’t resulting in a great deal of happiness. I just couldn’t get the wires in neatly without 2 or 3 rogue single wires going off in some tangent. So I went hunting for thiner, easier to use wire.

I found a great length of hard drive ribbon wire, must be a good 12″ length. So I’ve started rewiring all of the bits I desoldered. All the 4′s are done, with both the join and the spare length that goes to the breakoff from the shield. I figure tomorrow I’ll get the 2′s done and should be able to make progress with the break off. So I’m aiming for a Wednesday dry run plugging this baby in.

I should have thought this through better. All the edge holes need tow wires to fit in them. One from the inside board and one going to the break-off shield part. Using 22 gauge and the wire doesn’t fit. I have no idea why I soldered all those up without doing teh 2nd wire, I just wasn’t thinking. Now I’m stuck desoldering all the connections. I had a bit of a desperate freak out trying to find thin enough wire. Cat5 to the rescue, it’s almost perfect size. So I’ll be doing this backwards leap this afternoon and this evening. Maybe it’ll be done by tonight and the soldering will be over.

Note to anyone else starting one of these. The soldering of the boards is way harder than the components. So don’t have the feeling you’re almost there when you’ve done with the LED’s, Diodes and the shield. Im my opinion that’s just under the halfway mark of effort.

Tonight Rick (from work) very kindly offered to help me out at work after we were done for the day. In return for beer and pizza he offered kind direction and patiently explained Ohm’s law and other useful things when building electronics.

After our departing colleagues initial mocking turned to fascination (yes Tom you can come to the next one), we got down to business.

We made huge progress.

Rick took total ownership for flashing the Arduino with the Monome serial (something that I think next time round he might document).

I finished off the button PCB’s so all LED’s and Diodes are in. I started on the connections across the boards and got 80% done. I also stormed through the shield which is now totally done.

The last “big” job is the shield break off piece and wiring up the buttons to it. I realized I didn’t have any ribbon cable, so I think I’ll try and swing by IEI tomorrow morning and see if they have anything in stock that looks good.

I have no photo’s currently, but I’ll take my big camera into work tomorrow morning and take a bunch from various angles of the progress.

I’d say we are a very lazily 2 hours from have an unenclosed arduinome.

In his spare time Rick started playing around with his Arduino Mini’s (he has a few). I think he’s going to start looking at something that might be a USB midi device that has lots of knobs on it. Possibly something that will work well with the monome and enhance the capabilities. Could be interesting.

Spent 20-30 minutes last night getting all the LED’s in place and soldered. Just need to get the diodes in and then we’re onto the shield. No pictures I’m afraid, I’ll get some tonight.

I also found some nice and simple sparkfun PCB testing techniques to check for shorts. Probably all very 101, but I’ll work out how to relay the information and get it up here in case anyone else at my level is wondering the same thing.

I had a quick look over the unsped shield, slotted in some of the headers, but many of the holes in the pcb seemed alien to me, so I need to do some research and see if anyone has a good how-to for which components go where.

Updates:

Entartetemuzak has an awesome flickr shot, with everything annotated – many thanks !!!

Only had a couple of minutes this evening, but was keen to get the ball rolling so I soldered the diodes on one of the sparkfun boards.

Super easy going. Diodes are very clearly marked on the sparkfun pcb. There was a lot of legs to cut off, and I think I may need to go over them again later so they don’t stick in the buttons.

Next up is the LED’s. Which seem fairly safe as well. I also found a nice way to test for any shorts in my soldering (yes I still don’t trust it). With the diodes being uni-directional for current. If once it’s soldered in, take your meter on the ohm setting and touch the legs that if you can only get a reading in with your meter in one direction (i.e. red on the left one, black on right, then switch), you should be able to confidently say that you don’t have any cross leg solder shorts.

I’m hoping that once I have the LED’s and the diodes in place that there is some fairly simple means to test the connections — or maybe by then I might be more trusting of my soldering – it is easy going so far.

Didn’t have time to set up the timelapse, but I’ll get that sorted for tomorrows progress report.