It's christmas!

So christmas did come early, very early in fact. My Ardunio and assorted components arrived at 8:30am yesterday morning, that was speedy deliver. The circlip pliers turned up a little later too, but it turns out they are slightly too big - will have to try to find some different ones.

Last night I assembled the Ardunio proto shield and finished the night with a working button and fading led. Just two small problems, you can't upload to the Ardunio Uno using OSX 10.4.11. Yes, I know that's very old and I should upgrade!. Once I figured out that was the problem I switched to a Windows 7 box for writing the sketch (aka as a program :)) and it all worked fine. I also messed up the wiring of the switch, and didn't include a pull up resistor. This meant the input was floating and the input was random. Not a problem, as you can enable an internal pull up in the software. Once I figured that out it worked a treat.

Tonight I have assembled the gap detector in a small strip board. It works too! This will be used to detect when a frame is ready to be captured by the camera. For testing now it makes the little red led turn on briefly.

Next up the BIG WHITE LED!