Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Potentiometer and Next Photo Timer

I installed my potentiometer today, connecting it to the A0 analog input pin. It is used to select the time between consecutive photos. The way I have set it up, the analog values are mapped to times between 45 and 90 seconds. During photo transfer, the elapsed time since the photo was captured is recorded, and subtracted from the potentiometer "time" to tell the user the "Time until next photo". The time can be selected and changed during or after transfer by the user. The implementation was quite straightforward, though the number of wires hanging off the breadboard and Arduino tells me its getting nearly time to get a case set up for this thing! The photo below shows the potentiometer and updated LCD display... which is also getting full... might have to start scrolling or switching between 2 displays to fit all the information I want to show.


Saturday, June 15, 2013

LinkSprite library

I finally have most of my linksprite camera functions working, so I have migrated them into their own library inside of my code repository. Of course there are bound to be some bugs, if you find any, please do let me know, best would be with the issue tracker in the repo.

On the hardware side, I added a toggle switch that makes my life substantially easier when reprogramming the Arduino. Previously I would have to remove 2 jumpers on the XBee shield, so that the computer could talk to the microcontroller to reprogram its memory. Now, the switch (see photo below) allows me to easily select between the connected and disconnected states.


Next few times I work on the code, I will probably be fixing bugs with my library, and general issues in my issue tracker. Soon I do want to connect the DIP switches though. And I'm always looking for ideas on how to improve my transmission rates because that is the single easiest way to get my battery life to increase.