electronics is kinda hard

revision 1 of the Desktop Dingus is finished. it features:

- a green LED that turns red when you flip a switch
- a 4-digit 7-segment LED display that says things like "beer is good for you have some soon"
- 3 other switches that currently do nothing but are detected as on or off by the microcontroller
- a 2 port switchboard, ma bell style. yeah! also detected by the uC but doesn't do much else

as it happens, fabricating the dingus was kind of tough, with many trips to the hardware store for spacers, screws, nuts, etc. but hardest of all was getting the little stuff to work.

examples: discovering that I needed a pull-down resistor for my switches. it was not easy to get a single-color LED to light when the switch was thrown while not altering the detection by the uC of whether the switch was open. it was even less easy wiring up a 2-color LED that changes color at the flip of a switch -- while not altering the uC switch position detection. finally, it was really rather hard to do the above properly. i had to de-solder the LED subcircuit twice, destroying a transistor in the process (impatience).

rev 2 will probably feature a thermistor to tell the user ("the user", heh. me.) the ambient temp of the Desktop Dingus, but the main feature of rev 2 will be cooperative multitasking, to allow switch detection/actions to occur while the LED display is hard at work displaying stuff. this will be a software challenge, which i am better suited to tackle, but i expect electronics challenges to arise.

to assemble rev1, i had to use voltage dividers, a transistor, discover an inadvertent voltage divider in my circuit (whoops! i keep doing that...), pullup resistors, pulldown resistors, lots of crimp terminals, lots of soldering, and neither last nor least, an 8-bit shift register (i spent a couple hours trying to figure out how to control many switches from few uC pins and lit on the idea of the shift register, as suggested by an EE cohort. later, i found an arduino + shift register + many switches tutorial online. heh.).

anyhow, fun.