Week 13
Output Device Design
The thirteenth assignment is to add an output device to a microcontroller board you've designed and program it to do something.
My thinking is that a speaker is really just an electromagnet that is controlled by signals. My final project requires an actuator to trigger my driedels to spin and drop. If I can control a speaker....maybe I can modify it to control my driedel dropping actuator.
This is the final milled, stuffed and soldered board.
This is the software trying to program the board.
Red lights on the AVR programmer board is a bad thing. It tells you that something is wrong with the board. In this case, I had a cold solder joint wher it was not making a good electrical connection. I reflowed the solder and then it worked fine.
This is what the board and wiring looked like while testing. The power goes in and sound goes out!
The speaker works..but will it drive an actuator and will it have enough power? I am concerned as only 5 Volts goes into the speaker and the actuator I am thinking of requires 12 volts.
This is avrdude programing the board. There are parameters you can change for different sound effects. Hopefully those same parameters will be useful for tuning the output for my actuator that I plan to replace the speaker with.
Again, I chose to use an existing board, not one I designed, to do trouble shooting with. It worked well, but the assignment was to add an output device to a microcontroller board that I designed, not use one that Neil designed. Again, trying to maximize my time and effort, I used what I learned from this exercise and applied it to my final project, where I designed, fabricated, and modified code on a board of my own design on my final project. You can click here to see the board design, the programming files, and the design files for my final project board. (Scroll to the bottom of the page)