Mouser Chips Arrived! (FNR)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, June 25th, 2010

Hooray! I had a $50 prepaid credit card thanks to the Wolfram|Alpha “I want my money back!” program. Basically, I bought their iPhone App for $50, when I thought it was $4.99. Then they insanely dropped the price, too. I’m glad that they finally refunded us though, it is very kind and very modern of them!

I decided to buy 5 chips off of Mouser. 3 ATtiny85s, and 2 595-TLC5945PWPR 16-Ch LED Driver. The LED driver is a PWM shift out chip. It came to $15 bucks. Not too bad, right? Well, the shipping was $20. I don’t understand what was so important about the shipping. $20, seriously? OH and, I selected to pay the shipping at the door, but instead they took it off of the credit card! ARRG! So this is what my $35 went to:

1 sheet of bubble wrap:

Another sheet of bubble wrap:

Two more sheets of bubble wrap, and the electronics:

Fire pit material:

An ugly box:

Obviously that was not worth $20 of shipping. At least Sparkfun gives you a nice box that you can hack with!!! >:(

So the chips. YES! I cannot wait to see what these LED driver DIPs look like. Only the bag is sepperating me from these wonderful things now…

I open the bag, and this film reel thing slides onto the desk. What? I didn’t order a film reel?!

There’s two tiny chips inside of the film reel. But they’re NOT DIPs! I ordered a DIP because I don’t have a Weller! On the product it even said “DIP”! ARRG!

At least they got the ATtiny85s right…

So here it is. Two $5 chips and they aren’t even DIPs. I am royally doomed now. :’(

So yeah. I have no idea how I’m going to use these tiny things. I don’t have a precise soldering iron to make it work. Also, I have nothing to solder these things to! What on earth! I don’t want to go and do something extravogent, that’s why I bought the chips! All I wanted to do was drive LEDs! GRR!

Anyway, I checked out BubbleBoy to see what was going on inside of it with regards to the servos. It appears as though the wires attaching the servo to the head broke.

BubbleBoy would probably bob its head a lot better if the servos were attached to the head via metal axels. They’re only $3 at the local hobby store, so might as well buy the ones that fit this time instead of trying to aimlessly sand down the larger axels. It will be interesting to see how well the axels fare compared to the wire! ^_^ This will be a good time to refurbish BubbleBoy.

Posted in: Other, Projects.

Where Am I?

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, April 21st, 2008

Why were there no blog posts for a week? EEEEEK!

I was studying….working…programming! ^^

I’ll skip the terribly boring stuff and get to the point(s)
- Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday – track practice
- Spent Friday in Ottawa ^^
- Half of Saturday I soldered stuff
- Sunday I programmed in a GUI & went biking in mud with a friend
- Monday I am watching the Habs Homework I’ll do after

There was an extremely good day at school last week… we get to make a Rube Goldberg machine for Physics!! This is SO cool it’s unbelievable to have this opportunity. I’m still in awe, and verrry excited to start working with the wood with our team! Sure… our team may go overboard for a simple simple machine combination contraption … but when will the chance of building a Rube Goldberg machine come around again? ;P

What I am working on now is getting my LCD to display a custom screen that I drew out on paper. What the problem appears to be is that it can’t handle many characters… I have 3 custom characters… I FINALLY got the 3rd line to work, so now I have to figure out the 4th line. It’s really annoying. I’ll figure out, somehow, how to cut down the amount of info/characters that has to be displayed.

Additionally, I’m working on making a SQLite database interface for conversation links and language models. Once I get it working, I’ll be linking it up with Robbie. You can then imagine all the possibilities with regards to the different language models that will be downloadable! I’m thinking a gigantor mental math mini-game one…

My fingers on my right hand are insane… thumb- raw’ish from soldering. index- has something wrong with it as I can’t lift it middle- a chunk of skin is missing because I unplugged my magsafe the wrong way… ring- my grad ring is ALWAYS falling off pinky- sprained a bit, from … I have no clue o_o

That’s all for now. I like how next year’s FIRST robotics is going to be completely different, with the new WPI programmer software and all! 802.11n will be great for ANNs too. I hope I am lucky enough to take part in FIRST next year!

Posted in: Other, Projects.