Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Shell meet Gorilla Glue, Gorilla Glue meet Shell....

Many packages arrived today, the look on Elon's face was priceless. Every time the next package arrives he jumps up and down with anticipation of what it unlocks next in this build.

I started gluing the magnets to the shell, the ones that ripped off earlier. So far so good.

I also started to dig into the Light Sensor and why it was not working...

So here is what I did.

Steps
  1. Grab voltmeter and check the power and ground. After determining my sensor was 3.3V instead of 5V, I connected a flying wiring to the 3.3V rail on the Arduino Mega.
  2. Check if Sensor is now working.... nope..... Continue the debug
  3. Build a connector wire so that I can clip one probe lead and then using the other probe lead ohm out for connectivity that the data communication lines SCL and SDA are routed to the Mega.
  4. First I started with the wire to the grove shield. I had to desolder and resolder, so I could have had a bad solder joint.  I heard the connectivity line squeal when I touched the two points.Nope... debug continues....
  5. I then opened up the Eagle PCB layout and schematic viewer. To Check how the grove shield is wired.  Schematic PDF is available here
  6. The layout indicated pin 18 and 17 were the SCL/SDA..... hmmm, this seems in terms of Arduino Uno a different board all together.... something is starting to smell fishy. I keep going.
  7. I looked up the SCL/SDA pins on the Arduino Mega board..."Arduino Mega, SDA is pin 20 and SCL is 21" .  see this link for details
  8. I put one probe on the grove shield and the other on the Mega..... no squeal..... this means there is no connectivity.....
  9. Then I looked at the board from a birds eye view (top down) and saw this.
 If you look closely you will see the i2c pins are not connected at all to the prototype shield. So thats why i2c communication is not working. Using some jumper wire. I hooked into the grove shield header and jumped it to the mega prototype board on pin 20 and 21.

Typing "ALPN 1 1", the grow lights kicked on and I could see the light sensitivity jump in the output stream. It no longer was indicating communication timeouts as well.



So... case of the light sensor not working.... Solved. and we press on....

Also in the mail the rock-wool, and our first seeds arrived.  Still missing Temp and Humidity sensor... that one is important along with the humidifier.

I also noticed I placed my ph and EC sensor boards too close for when I add the sensor BNC cable to it... so I will need to dismount them and drill a hole in the cable mgmt box for additional space. Live and learn the next time I build a FC 1.0.


Till next time, Keep Building, Learning and "Growing"

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