remember, kids, rtgoddamnfuckingm
Not as productive of a night as I'd hoped.
I got a sketchy little husk of a serial port reader program compiled and loaded onto the Diecimila. I took it off USB, plugged a 9V battery in, and waited for gorgeous XBee status blinking to commence.
Weeeeell, the LED shone bright and steady, indicating no link, and rapidly dropped in brightness. "Oh fuck," I said. Yanked the power. The Arduino still boots and accepts software writes, and the XBee module still works when I drop it onto a testing board, but GAH.
My first thought was that 9V was clearly too high of a voltage in, and was doing horrible things to the assemblage. So then I spent an hour desoldering and resoldering the battery clip so I could use its coax connector on the variable power brick instead. Then I worried because I couldn't attain exactly 5V (crucial plot point, here) unregulated from the power brick.
More worrying, and then I whined to neuro42 about my problems, and he pointed out:
(a) that I'd forgotten to RTFM, and they actually are rated for 7 to 20 volts in, not 5, and
(b) I ought to check the polarity on the coax plug, and while I was at it, check the voltage coming from the battery. neuro42 told me how to do that. So I undid the battery clip work again, and found that the battery was only putting out 6 and a half volts, and once filtered through the onboard regulator, only 3.7.
DAAAH.
So it's not that I almost frotzed the whole assemblage. It's just low on power, thus the weird XBee behavior. I should buy some more plugs.
I also discovered that half the stuff I bought from AllElectronics for the power supply is the wrong thing -- the plugs they sent me technically fit, but are too long to fit in the jacks. Also, the cable I got is hyooooge, it's way too thick, and of course AE puts minimal product description on their website. I think I want to buy cable in person if possible, and return these jacks.
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I got a lot done at work today. teferi and I wandered around the Village for an hour looking for burgers, and successfully dispatched two of them, and nattered about David Foster Wallace and Climbing Poetry, mere moments before the lightning started. I wobbled home and finished the first disc of House s4 and decided I don't really have the stomach for psycho-thrillers these days (at least not ones involving quite so much dramatized rape and electroshock) and I was too tired to deal with a trip to the laundromat after all. So I bumbled around with electricity. Shyeah.
I got a sketchy little husk of a serial port reader program compiled and loaded onto the Diecimila. I took it off USB, plugged a 9V battery in, and waited for gorgeous XBee status blinking to commence.
Weeeeell, the LED shone bright and steady, indicating no link, and rapidly dropped in brightness. "Oh fuck," I said. Yanked the power. The Arduino still boots and accepts software writes, and the XBee module still works when I drop it onto a testing board, but GAH.
My first thought was that 9V was clearly too high of a voltage in, and was doing horrible things to the assemblage. So then I spent an hour desoldering and resoldering the battery clip so I could use its coax connector on the variable power brick instead. Then I worried because I couldn't attain exactly 5V (crucial plot point, here) unregulated from the power brick.
More worrying, and then I whined to neuro42 about my problems, and he pointed out:
(a) that I'd forgotten to RTFM, and they actually are rated for 7 to 20 volts in, not 5, and
(b) I ought to check the polarity on the coax plug, and while I was at it, check the voltage coming from the battery. neuro42 told me how to do that. So I undid the battery clip work again, and found that the battery was only putting out 6 and a half volts, and once filtered through the onboard regulator, only 3.7.
DAAAH.
So it's not that I almost frotzed the whole assemblage. It's just low on power, thus the weird XBee behavior. I should buy some more plugs.
I also discovered that half the stuff I bought from AllElectronics for the power supply is the wrong thing -- the plugs they sent me technically fit, but are too long to fit in the jacks. Also, the cable I got is hyooooge, it's way too thick, and of course AE puts minimal product description on their website. I think I want to buy cable in person if possible, and return these jacks.
-----
I got a lot done at work today. teferi and I wandered around the Village for an hour looking for burgers, and successfully dispatched two of them, and nattered about David Foster Wallace and Climbing Poetry, mere moments before the lightning started. I wobbled home and finished the first disc of House s4 and decided I don't really have the stomach for psycho-thrillers these days (at least not ones involving quite so much dramatized rape and electroshock) and I was too tired to deal with a trip to the laundromat after all. So I bumbled around with electricity. Shyeah.