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This can work, but it will actually be pretty tricky to generate the focused infrared beam that you need.
An IR LED, for example, sends its light in a huge, broad cone of light, maybe 20-40 degrees across. That means that it’s not going to be very sensitive to where you aim. It also means that the IR light is spread over a VERY large area– and very weak (too weak to trigger a phototransistor) over the targets that it does hit. One approach that might work is to use a telescope to project the light into a very small angle. (A video camera that can see IR light might make this practical.)A second issue is that an IR phototransistor is sensitive to *any* source of infrared light that falls within its band of sensitivity. You will need to worry about sunlight and strong incandescent lights, as sources of shadows that can trigger the phototransistors.It *may* be a better approach to use visible light. You could use “regular” phototransistors, and detect a carefully-focused flash from an LED, too. The difference is that you would be able to see a flash of light where you shot.As far as limiting shots, either counting the time or number of shots is likely practical, but either method would require reprogramming the unit.It looks like you’ve got an extra Peggy2 folder inside your Peggy2 folder. Put the files directly inside the libraries/Peggy2 folder.
Please let me know if this helps.I’m not entirely sure how to answer your question. There are any number of types of IR receivers and sensors, and many of them do produce an appropriate signal that can trigger the Art Controller.
It is certainly possible to modify the Art Controller to stay on for a certain number of shots (if you can somehow detect that those shots have been fired), rather than time, but it would require reprogramming to do so. We might be able to assist with some programming examples for similar situations.It looks to me as though the QX5251 is protected against reverse connection on the battery, so that probably isn’t the issue.
And, if your blue LED is lighting up (at all) with a 1.5 V battery, then both the IC and the inductor are likely working; it wouldn’t otherwise. If anything, I’d suspect the solar cell.Download this revised MeggyJr.h file, and use it to replace the one in your Meggy Jr library:
Awesome!
A few questions to get started with:
– By “column 1,” do you mean the left-most column, or the one next to it?– Is every LED in this column dark?– Is this also the case in other applications?Also here is a thread that appears to have some possible solutions for these kinds of issues:
Hmmm.
Did you already install the Eggbot extensions for Inkscape?– If so, you might consider re-installing Inkscape (a fresh copy) and see if that fixes it. It is possible (although as-yet unheard of) that the Eggbot extensions have caused the issue.– If not, I’m close to suggesting that you file a bug report with Inkscape, to see if anyone there has suggestions.– An error like “peggy2 does not name a type” means that the Arduino software cannot compile the sketch; typically because you haven’t installed the Peggy2 library. In our tests here, programs generated by Peggy Draw 2 can be opened in Arduino 1.01 and compile correctly (so long as the library is installed).
– An error like “not in sync” means that the Arduino software was able to compile your sketch fully and completely, and is unable to connect to the external hardware.Hi tnaik01,
This is not actually a related issue. The “not in sync” error likely means that your Peggy is not connected to your computer, is not powered on, or has some other kind of hardware issue. Check your connections carefully, and make sure that everything is set up correctly. Try also just programming some of the example sketches before branching out to use the PeggyDraw.If you have continued difficultly, please start a new forum discussion and describe the issue and your setup to the best of your ability, please. :)If you look at the gerber of a soldermask layer, what you’ll find is that it’s actually a negative layer. Soldermask goes everywhere on your PCB except where you have features in that gerber layer. And yes, you need to have holes in the soldermask around every pin and pad that you want electrical connections to, because you can’t make electrical connections through the soldermask.
By default, gEDA puts a hole in the soldermask around every SMT pad in a footprint, which is how it generated the holes in the soldermask above your footprint.For the next round, you should probably skip the .png portion; you could even modify StippleGen to output your pins and pads, so that you skip inkscape entirely. :)Also, it’s a *very* good idea to run the DRC (design rule check) on your PCB before even exporting to gerber. It will make sure that you don’t have any features (let alone 20,000) that are too small to fabricate.Hi RobotGrrl,
I’m sorry to see that it didn’t turn out– it looked pretty good a few weeks ago in gEDA. :(From a quick glance at your Gerbers, I would have guessed that your top side would have had a nearly-solid copper layer across the top, and that you would have had soldermask holes through it, showing the “plasma” pattern in exposed copper (likely either gold or solder plated copper). I do think that I see what what might have gone wrong, however.It seems as though your “plasma” pattern is not made up of little circles, but of *really* little square pixels, where each of those square pixels is only a few mils across– likely smaller than the minimum feature size of the soldermask from your PCB manufacturer. While the manufacturer may not be able to fabricate it as you drew it, they should have caught the error and asked you to revise it. So, this is at least partly a mistake on the fault of the manufacturer.In testing here, I was able to convert the SVG to a PDF, and then to use pstoedit to convert that to a PCB file, all while keeping the original circle shapes from the SVG file. That can then be converted into a footprint, to clear the soldermask from the PCB. Alternately, you can create a second “copper” layer that contains the original pattern, and then manually merge the gerber for that layer with the gerber for the soldermask, to create extra holes in your soldermask, even without doing it directly in PCB.What route did you use, such that you ended up with the pixelation?Two possibilities that I can think of: Either you have more than one copy of Inkscape on your computer, or Inkscape is not installed in the right location. So, first check to see if you might have one version of inkscape– for example, one where you unzipped the download, or on your desktop. If so, remove it.
Then, note that on Windows, Inkscape needs to be installed in the [Program Files directory]Inkscape directory before the installer will work correctly. If your copy of Inkscape is not there, move it there, and then run the installer again. You may also want to upgrade to the latest Inkscape (0.48.2) before installing the extensions.
I’m not entirely sure what the problem might be. That should be the right version of Inkscape, and the current version of Xquartz is XQuartz-2.7.3.
One thing to check is to see if there might be an older copy of either Inkscape, Xquartz, or X11 on your computer; please look in both your applications folder and in your applications/utilities folder. (If there is, it could be the case that your computer is opening one of the old versions when you just ask your computer to open up an existing file.)Also, if you can get it open (even for a moment) click and hold the dock icon for Inkscape or XQuartz in your dock, and select “Show in Finder” from the pop-up menu. That will highlight the actual applications in use, so that you can verify that they are the correct ones.
