Marathon coding nightmare + test bearing solder

Today we spent 10 hours at uni, 9 of which were spent fumbling with the clumsey arduino coding system trying to make an automated version of the simple POV program. at first this sounds easy. Instead of having the letters hard-coded into the program and re-uploaded each time, just make it display whatever is sent over the serial port. easy right?

WRONG!!

Shit was SO difficult, partly because of the way the original code worked, but mostly because arduino is so lame when it came to working with arrays and kept throwing up funky errors for basic things which any other language could do easily. This, coupled with our generaly noobyness in regards to coding led to a nightmare. After about 10 failed attempted on my behalf we attracted the attention of Dekker. When your problem stumps dekker, you KNOW it's a problem, that guy is a genius!

So we became his little project, we could see it eating away at him as he helped us. but eventually, at 6pm at night, we achieved success!!!!!

we now have arduino code which takes letters and spaces from the serial port, places them into an array, then displays them on a loop. you can send $ to clear the array for now data, or else you can append the current data by simply typing more. such a perfect solution!

We also did a test solder of wires to the bearings to ensure it was possible; it was. We then hooked the wires up to power and a multimeter to ensure they transferred power. They did, but when they spin it was not a stead current. We discussed this issue and many more in our group meeting from 6 till 7 and decided on a potential solution. Run the power into a rechargeable battery, then into the arduino, so if the flow is not consistent it wont matter. There is a probably a specific piece of hardware to do this which we will look into.

We also heavily discussed the mounting situation and the shielding situation and decided on a probable solution. Overall a very productive day.