Assembled, Programming

Published on 2016-04-16 in Mechatronic Ears.

Since all my “current” projects are either waiting for parts, or being punished for not going the way I wanted, I decided to finish this one. I started with connecting all the wires to an ATTiny85 I have soldered to a breakout board. Turns out that the accelerometer connected to the chip’s pins doesn’t prevent it from being programmed! Yay, that means I can just solder the chip in place and re-program it with a clip.

Next step, I made some connectors for the servo sockets, so that I can use SoftwareSerial on them for debugging. In particular, I needed to check what are the rangers on the accelerometer readings. Turns out that “0” is smack in the middle of the range, at 512, and 1g is about 100 units. Good enough.

Next I will need to check the servo’s limits (since I’m not using exactly 50Hz for PWM, they will be different) and actually write the code for the ears-moving logic… I guess for that last part, I will still use the Pro Mini-based prototype. It’s simply easier to reprogram.