Amazon Prime is a wonderful thing. My ATMEGA328p chips turned up yesterday so I have managed to get a good start on the prototype mk2 build.
Firstly, I needed to be able to burn my code onto the 328 chips, so I built this programmer board, which uses an Arduino NANO. It took me a while to get the bootloader just right to allow the 328p to run without the 16MHz crystal which is usually recommended, but as I will not need this level of precision for my project I feel that being able to remove this component and its associated capacitors was worth the effort. The LEDs on the board show me when things are working (green), if there is an error (red) and if data is being transferred (blue).
Once programmed, the chip is then transferred over to my prototyping board, which currently consists of a PSU (at the left), four buttons (two are the buttons from my design and the other two replicate the mode switch which I need to purchase), one potentiometer (to start giving me analogue input voltage) and an LCD screen. The screen is just for testing and debugging purposes, and I will likely use a very different type of display (or none at all!) for the final product. So far, I have managed to get the mode switch and analogue input working (currently controlling the fist lane’s number of ‘hits’), and have recycled the sequence generating part of the code from the first prototype.
Next up will be the multiplexing – hopefully my CD4051 chips turn up tomorrow!
