Is not too horrible if you have breakfast at 6:30 pm after working all day. Although it doesn't leave you in good shape for preparing lunch.
Yes, it was another fun Sunday in the lab. With just a little bit more to go with the Hamsters, we decided to get it over with. We had to get the Weather Hamster collecting data from two sensors and communicating properly with the PC, all without disrupting the rest of the system which was working correctly.
This doesn't sound too bad, in theory. In practice, we spent three hours troubleshooting faulty hardware. Once we finally swapped out a microcontroller that would not for love or money write out a bit to Port E Bit 1, things began to go a little better. Also encountered: lack of analog voltage source for the A/D converter, totally non-functional A/D converter, timing issues with the A/D… Obviously the A/D was the source of most of our problems.
With the lack of spare parts, I was very conservative about cannibalizing working Hamsters, lest we end up having no working system at all to demonstrate on Tuesday.
Ratso tried to desolder an old A/D converter from a partially destroyed board, but destroyed the A/D in the process. "Whoops! I bent it."
I finally let them pull a working A/D from its socket on a working board. Once we had a full set of working hardware for the Weather Hamster, everything started working (funny how that is) and it was just a matter of cleaning up the software. Stupid mistakes like setting a port as an output and then trying to read something into it.
The whole system is pretty much done now. We'd better demo for our advisors before someone breathes on it.
294 words | May 1, 2005 08:37 PM | Ivory tower