With all these projects I’ve accomplished over the past year, I figure I need to start a new one over the summer so I’m not bored, or embellish the ones I’ve already finished. Fouric’s project, spinal terror, is great but I’m waiting for him to get out of college classes so that we can work on the project more consistently. Starting a new project is pretty much out of the question because I am working this summer to save for college, so spending a lot of money on a new project isn’t very reasonable. I came to the conclusion that I should improve on some of my finished projects! I’m going to start with ArkenPi, since my binary watch is pretty fresh in my head. I need a break from that one.
If you don’t understand a ton of circuit theory, have experience reading schematics, or played with a lot of circuits, then building your own schematic can seem daunting.
Though exciting, finding the right way to tackle this project has been tough! But I’m taking it in chunks.
5 months ago, I’d never designed a project from scratch. 5 months later, I’ve learned to design a PCB from a schematic, manufacture it, use a barebones microcontroller, 3D model with fusion360, write code that interacts with hardware, and much more. This was a crazy fun project!
So far, I have completed all of the goals I wanted to get done before college. This is huge! And now I’m bored…
A little under a month ago, my PCBs arrived! It has been a hilariously long wait to get everything else up to par.
Last we saw, I got the binary watch code working with the 32.768kHz clock and fuse bytes (aside from the buttons!
For the past week I’ve been debugging hardware and software to get my barebones ATmega328P to work with a 32.768kHz oscillator as Timer 2, which will tick outside of the sleeping microcontroller. This way I can keep track of time even as the microcontroller is off and saving power.