Not dead yet

Post date: Jul 27, 2014 9:13:36 PM

My wife convinced me to give it a day before I really gave up. She was right. I started on the simple part, so I removed the bridge and started the refinishing process of the top. If I really want to make it look nice, I think I'm going to have to remove the finish from the entire top. Right now the sanded area really shows up under certain lighting conditions.

Then I moved on to the dead LED string. I started by simply removing the 12th fret. That gave me access to the power rail and the output signal from the 12th fret. Power was good, but no signal was present on the LED (not surprising). That led me to conclude that I had to dig into the first fret to access the first LED in the string. The serial stream was present at the LED (before the 330 ohm resistor). After the resistor, there was a strange DC bias and a small square wave (<1V p-p) on the input line. I ended up concluding that the first pixel died somewhere along the way. Not clear why. I removed the device and replaced it with a wire (no point replacing until I knew that the remaining LEDs were good). Luckily, the rest of the string was fine. I replaced the device and the whole string lit up. Yay!!

I then reconnected the string to the Arduino Micro (I was testing with a UNO) and closed up the Uke. I modified the code to use a slightly different library for the encoder. This one polls instead of using an interrupt. I changed it because the AdaEncoder doesn't seem to support the Micro (32U4).

Next to revisit the power system. Need a new battery solution. Considering dropping back to a 9V battery now, instead of waiting for 2.0.