First go at wiring

After ruining myself at Indymanbeercon on Friday night I decided to get the arduino setup on saturday.  This was 5 hours of pain.
Getting IDE installed was fine; I could not get the drivers installed no matter what I did.
Whether it was a hardware wizard or manually installing drivers I had downloaded I could not get it done.

In my device manager it did not say 'ports com' as it should, instead just saying 'other device' which I could not get to work. I found myself typing stuff I didnt understand into google and then getting frustrated that I didnt understand the suggestions.

I gave up and decided to have a look at the pi. This is the point I found out that my pc monitor did not have an hdmi connection. Swearing.

Saturday and sunday night I decided to get the components wired together.  I thought it would be best to just use the gpio pins on the pi and leave power distribution seperate from the board so I didnt blow anything up.  I could then lay out the power circuit on a breadboard and install resistors as necessary.

I got the control bits done by the end of the weekend. It looked like this:

I think at this point I realised that one of my project goals should be to design and build something to hold all this in a way that makes it easy to work and looks nice. I reckon I'll see if I can get it done on solidworks and 3d print it. I used solidworks for the first time last week so it should be a good bit of practice.

On Monday I went to see Tom in the robocave for some help with the arduino. We got mine working on a different laptop and none of the working nanos would get recognised by my laptop.  Turns out that if you have an arduino nano with an unlicensed driver chip then there is a high chance it will stop your laptop from working with any arduino nano.

Once again I got hooked up; Tom sorted me out with a teensy which is much better than an arduino nano and can be made to work with the IDE software by installing something called teensyduino. Unsurprisingly, it's tiny.