I have had nothing but failures with the Universal T boards. Losing setting whenever turned off or just flat out dying. Their junk.
Here's the video of it skipping shots, or shooting when there isn't a ball. Not sure what caused that.
This happened across more than just one T board? Those use a PIC microchip, which stores settings in EEPROM like the Atmels powering the Arduino stuff. It should be non-volatile storage.
Looks like the thunderstorms are going to hold off until Tuesday, so I can finally go play some paintball with this gun tomorrow night!
I was setting up my netbook earlier so I could fix any bugs that may arise and reprogram the board at the field. It took a while to get all the drivers sorted out. It was WAY more difficult to get the Arduino IDE working in Windows (7 Pro) than it was on my MacBook. Go figure. But, I got it working, and able to program the Uno, Nano and Femto boards reliably... and then my power supply died. lol Thankfully they are only $8 on amazon (and Prime shipping too!) so I've got a new one on the way.
Losing the settings happened on 2 Tboards, Flat out dying occured on 3 others. This was the Autococker T boards.
I actually had a dead UTB - no idea what was wrong with it, but it wouldn't flash like any of his boards.
He sent me a new one.. which was the wrong one. Sent me another one, and we were golden.
It's OK though, cuz now I have 2 UTB's - 1 open bolt and 1 closed.
Over the weekend I found Pinguino which is a project that allows you to compile Arduino programs for various PIC microchips. This is kind of like the chipKit system, except it's unofficial, and isn't just for the PIC32 platform. I may be able to use this to take my code and try it out on existing boards with PIC chips. I have a PIC programmer on the way so I can try this out on my old Droid board, although I'm not 100% sure that the chip on that is supported by this.
Shot skipping went away. I had a weird issue with the valve not sealing and hissing air. Loosened up the set screw for it and it was fine. Shot probably a case through it today.
Swapped out the 7805 on my test board with this voltage regulator and it dropped the operating current from ~36mA to ~26mA. Idling is around 22mA.
Tomorrow I'm going to start working on a second prototype board that uses the Femtoduino board without the built-in USB. I've also got one of these MiniFTX USB adapters that I can use with the regular Femtoduino board when I need to upload new code to it. This way the USB connector and FTDI chip are not always connected, powered up, and drawing current.
Those two things should help bring the battery life up on my test unit, not that it's actually been an issue so far, but I haven't really been using it a lot.
Itty bitty things:
Those boards are awesome.
Curt Hartung also just posted on the tinkers guild about making boards available and helping with information. Post is here... http://www.network54.com/Forum/9013/...se+interested-