Soo… the latest update… I had wired in the SD memory stick reader and had been testing it separate from the main roaster program. I’ve found having a “dedicated” programs for a particular sensor with the rest of the sensors and displays attached but not initialized has resulted in easier testing and troubleshooting.\u00a0 Occasionally it works right away but other times conflicts come up.\u00a0 Generally once I have manage to confirm it works without the other code running I at least have a reasonable assumption that it may actually work and is wired properly.\u00a0\u00a0 Since I’m pretty new to the whole wiring these things up it’s a pretty good idea to test my wiring out.\u00a0 So far I’ve actually done pretty well reading enough about each sensor to figure out what I need to make it work the first time.\u00a0 If I go too long not getting it to work I try to disconnect everything else and run it by itself which usually helps me identify conflicting pin usage that I didn’t see initially.<\/p>\n
So far I tend to find issues with the LCD interface \/ graphic chip \/ memory config chip to conflict with a particular pin here and there.\u00a0 If it works without the LCD boards attached it obviously has a much smaller number of pins from the new sensor to try to find a conflict with. Usually by the time I isolate the LCD away from the system I’ve managed to throw together code that works within minutes of starting things up again.
\nMy last success with the SD memory was short lived because I discovered there were pins that I had not noticed on the SSD1926 that apparently do something even though I’m in 8 bit mode instead of 16 bit.\u00a0 They seem to have ended up being connected when I was trying to check my Write Protect and Card Detect pins. \u00a0 It took probably about 3 hours of looking at the schematic for the graphics board assembly to figure out which wires (15 minutes) it was and then find some (the rest of the time) that were not being used already. \u00a0 Since I am using 8 bit communication instead of\u00a0 the 16 bit mode I would have assumed them to be “dormant” and potentially available. \u00a0 Not quite sure what is going on with that since I have not obtained the data sheet for the SSD1926 chip yet.<\/p>\n
I had an unexpected guest show up early in the week and didnt get much time to work on this.\u00a0 After making a few adjustments to the wiring I got it up and writing to the SD with the LCD attached.\u00a0 This weekend I got it loaded inside the Coffee Roaster programming.\u00a0 I ran into a few initialization problems that resulted in a momentary “stream of gibberish” coming out the UART port that I was using for watching status of some of the code I was troubleshooting with in a terminal window.\u00a0 It seemed as if the system had a baud rate to the com port of the computer that suddenly “shifted” up and down a few times in the middle of the machine starting up and then returned to normal. After I removed some of the apparently duplicate excess code from the init area it resumed working normally.<\/p>\n
I then had to move the “write to SD” down through the startup past the time and date retrieval area.\u00a0 This results in accurate time\/date stamps on the file now being written to the SD memory card.\u00a0 I then began to modify the SD demo write into a command that builds the buffer data using a sprintf template inserting date and time on a line separated by commas and a few sections (with 0.00’s right now) for sensor data as well.\u00a0 I’m going to bundle the write commands up into a function so that I can insert it into roaster loop as a external function.\u00a0 Every time it samples the temperatures and other future sensors it will shove it into the call to the “write to SD” function where it will get formatted and append to the file it created during the initialization of a new roast loop.<\/p>\n
As I said, I havent had much time to work on it this past week but probably tonight and tomorrow I’ll get significantly closer to figuring that part out and probably test running the roaster with nothing in it just to get some temperaturee logging as it goes up\/down for a few seconds and then exit the roast to close it to check the accuracy. Then when I’m sure that’s working I’ll try to do a regular roast with it out in the kitchen and see if I can get “good numbers” that I can post.<\/p>\n
If I can get that working then the next step will be to get a “file management” function going to come up with names of files to make them unique and maybe let me load the data into the system to preview it on a graph on the PIC32 LCD as well as delete files. THEN I get to start figuring out how to program it to control things by itself based on my normal data.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Soo… the latest update… I had wired in the SD memory stick reader and had been testing it separate from the main roaster program. I’ve found having a “dedicated” programs for a particular sensor with the rest of the sensors and displays attached but not initialized has resulted in easier testing and troubleshooting.\u00a0 Occasionally it works right away but other times conflicts come up.\u00a0 Generally once I have manage to confirm it works without the other code running I at least have a reasonable assumption that it may actually work and is wired properly.\u00a0\u00a0 Since I’m pretty new to the \u2026 Continue reading