This week, we had to add an output device to a microcontroller board that we designed and program it to do something.On the input week, i had done
the phototransistor board and next weeks assignment is networking and communications.
So i decided to interlink the assignments of those 2 weeks with the this week and
hence decided to make the LCD display for this week so that i could connect both
input and output board for the networking week.
creating the board
I referred Niel's board and designed an LCD board with an additional pushbutton
for the working of LCD Display. The idea was that when tpinshe button was pushed, a
message would be displayed the LCD Display. Also added Tx & Rx pins for serial communication with the input board.
The next step was milling the board using the modella MDX-20. After that, the
soldering was done pretty quickly.Inorder to test if the board was working, i first ran Neils code on a test basis. I got the avrdude rc =-1 error. Seems like there was
something wrong with the board.
I started the debugging process by checking the board with a multimeter and straight
away i found the problem. Some pins of the ATtiny 44 were interconnected.
In the design, some traces were pretty close to pins traces and the 1/64 bit i used for milling couldnt seperate them.
I had to manually seprate the traces using a penknife. I was a bit hasty and ended up
damaging the mill traces.I tried to remake the damaged traces using copper wire. Alas, because of the xtra thin size of the traces, I ended up further damaging the board.
The board was unusable now. So i milled a new board with the same design. I didnt change the design because the entire board would have to be redeigned to change the
small flaw. This time, I carefully seperated the taces using penknife and a scale.
Then i soldered the new board using the components from the old board and checked
the connections using multimeter.Everything seemed fine so i connected it to my computer and tested using Neils code and BINGO...... The board displayed a HELLO WORLD message.One hurdle passed!!!
Next i needed to programme the board to respond to the button.I modified
Neils code and tried to programme the board. But due to some error, the makefile couldnt be created.
I spend some time trying to correct the code but due to the time limit(I was running behind on my assignments),I had to abandon the effort to correct the code.
Next i created an arduino code and programmed the board using arduino IDE.
Programming was successfull but there were some problems with the working because of error in the code. After some debugging, i got the code right and tried again. This time, The output worked. When i pressed the button, a message would be displayed on the LCD Display and when i stopped pressing the Display would
clear.
