Hi all,
I'm making a led lightshow for my hexa by letting the brain control ledstrips on the 6 arms. However I need some help concerning the available hardware output pins.
What do the pins on the bottom, next to the dipswitches, do in the following picture ? I'm guessing they are the 40 available digital IO pins ? Are they free to use in arducopter ? Which PORT? variable commands them ? Lots of questions, I know, see below if you have time for the reason for my curiosity.
I'll use ardupilotmega output pins to control a ULN2803A darlington transitor chip, which in turn will power the 12V hobbyking ledstrips. Concept was proven by Max Levine here : http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/321-blink
Originally my intend was to use AN8 - AN15, but I had my board upside down while soldering (I'm lucky not to have ruined it, this wasn't my best electronics weekend, smoked my 2.4Ghz video tx for fpv) and I soldered the ULN2803 to the ports next to the dipswitches on the imu.
Me working on this till (very) late in the evening might have something to do with it also.
Ofcourse my ledsstrips didn't work as expected, but they did light up, somewhat. I had 3 strips connected for testing. 1 lighted up brightly, 1 medium bright, and 1 very faintly. NICE ! dimmable leds :-) Why not add pulsing leds to my lightshow routines ?
Ofcourse I first spent almost this complete weekend trying to find out why the leds didn't behave as expected, only to find out just now that I soldered them to the wrong pins.
So I'd like to know if I can just leave the soldering, and change my code to use these pins instead, and maybe in the process have dimmable leds ?
I've tried to find out by myself what these pins are, but apart from the first picture above, and the eagle files (from which I can't find my answers) I haven't found anything.
Anybody who can enlighten me ?
Replies
Well, meanwhile I got a few led patterns programmed. They can be changed in flight with the lower part of chan7 (if you assing it to a slider or knob)
Here's a quick preview.
Ok, finally got it working. Damn, ran into heaps of small problems trying to implement it this weekend, but I learned an awfull lot about arduino and portmanipulation :-) Now the possibilities are nearly endless!
I decided not to use the pwm outputs. I think it might be possible to also dim the leds using the analog ports, if they can be used as analog outputs ?
there is a pin table here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlDHmpARnagbdDJVanpBWT...
Look under the red board and you'll see the pin outs labeled in white.
Jason
Okay, already found out 2 of the pins, they are apparentely PWM outputs that are used for octocopter frames, to control 2 motors. Seems I have pin 11 connected to 1 of my ledstrips, which explains the dimmable effect :-)
Anybody know what the other pins are ?