Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology.
That’s a backronym if I’ve ever heard one.
Basically, my laptop’s hard drive is dead.
Get S.M.A.R.T.
1
Etch for Success!
So, my attempt at make home-brew etchant before was a miserable failure, but I think I’ve found the solution:
Hehe…get it?
Ain’tacid
When you feel like doing some really rapid prototyping and don’t want to wait around for a board to come in the mail, you usually have to print a board of your own. I’ve done this a number of times (the original bullet counter was a home-printed board).
The whole process has a number of steps (which I will be going into in another post), but one of them involves printing an acid-resistant substance on a copper sheet and dissolving the un-coated copper in an acid. As I have mentioned earlier, I had some really crummy ferric chloride acid that didn’t do a very good job of etching my boards. I would usually end up sitting around for an hour or so waiting for it to etch only to have the etchant start to eat under my etch-resist while other free portions were still un-dissolved.
Ferric chloride is also kind of pricey, so I decided to try my hand at some home-brew etchant. I found a recipe online that calls for just two ingredients:
Muriatic Acid (HCL) and Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2)
LED persistence of vision toy
When I was at the rock gym last week, one of the staff members had some gloves with blinking LEDs in the finger tips and was dancing around like an idiot. A friend of mine was jealous and said in passing “you should invent something for me to swing around so I can go to a rave.”
Continue reading
Good bearings
So, I finally figured out what the deal was with my accelerometer needing to be asked twice what the value was.
As it turns out, I wasn’t actually giving the chip time to reply. I thought the micro would automatically handle receiving the data value, so I all I had to do was send the ACK at the end. In fact, the command that sends the ACK actually tells the micro controller to wait until the entire data byte has been transmitted, and then transmits the ACK.
So, when I was storing the value before sending the ACK, I was storing the value that I originally had in the register (the address of the accelerometer chip) and then waiting for the data and finally sending the ACK. Now, I’ve changed it so that it waits for the data and sends the ACK before storing the data value in the register.
How did I figure all of this out? With an O-scope! I simply modified my code so that it would give me a voltage spike on one of the output pins while it was reading the data from the register. What I noticed was that it was spiking before it was supposed to. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Punctual, but Problematic
So, you haven’t seen an update out of me in a while. This is because I’ve been struggling over the past week with getting my clock to return accurate, or at least consistently inaccurate results.
My test method was to use a little program that I wrote that would give me a 10 second count down before starting a timer that increments the LEDs once per minute. The idea was to use the 10 seconds to synchronize the timer with a timer known to be accurate and then let it run for a few hours and see how far off the minute mark it was. Take the number of seconds it’s off, divide by total number of seconds elapsed, and multiply by 1 million to get the parts per million (ppm) accuracy.
See, every crystal oscillator needs to be “tuned” with some Load Capacitors. I tried my best to match the Load Caps to the 22pF rating on the crystal’s spec sheet (even taking into account the parasitic capacitance on the breadboard), but I still couldn’t get good results.
Me and the Cap’n
So, it turns out that clock crystals need a “load capacitance” between each of their two pins and ground. I’m not entirely certain what these capacitors even do, but I do know that they are critical to keeping good time.
That nixie tube clock that I made originally had a clock crystal in it that had no load capacitors. This resulted in it being inaccurate.
Tik Tok
I have a clock!
So last night/today, I worked on getting the clock part of my AVR working. Here’s the basic rundown.
The ATmega48A has what’s called an asynchronous timer. A timer usually works by simply incrementing a number on a fixed interval of time and doing something special when that number reaches a certain value. Most of the time, the timer will just increment every time the processor’s clock ticks. An asynchronous timer is special in that it can clock along at an entirely different pace.
While the processor is chugging along at 8MHZ, my clock timer is clicking along at 32.768kHz. How do I know this? Because I have it connected to a 32,768Hz clock crystal. Why such an odd number? Lemme explain.
Dearly Departed
So today was something of a downer.
I received my LGA-16 breakout board from proto-advantage.com yesterday, and decided to give reflow soldering another shot with my digital accelerometer, the LIS33DE.
The LIS33DE is the first 3V chip I’ve used that cannot also run at 5V. Because of this, I decided to re-do my breadboard and get myself a 3V power supply. I found an old PC power supply that can output 3.3 volts which is close enough. I’ve got some mounting posts that I’m planning on bolting to the power supply to make it a little easier to manage, but for tonight, I just used some alligator clips to bring the 3.3V to my board.
Now, along this process, I did a very stupid thing. I left my micro controller and temperature probe connected to the board. I’ve always been a fan of hot-plugging in the face of adversity, but in this case, I was a little too reckless, and not only killed another micro controller, but also the temperature probe!
Luckily, I had backups of both, and while desoldering a SOIC part is tedious, it’s by no means impossible.
And the good lord said, let there be LED!
So, I haven’t updated in a while (it’s been one hell of a week), but just to get you up to speed. I got my new micro controllers and everything is just peachy there. Don’t worry, I found a new home for the old ones:
More importantly, I got my LEDs!