Silly Mistake and a New Piece Added

Well with me being so excited with getting past my last hurdle, as soon as I got out of work and ate some dinner, I went to Walmart to get some rechargeable batteries to use for my project.  I put them in my battery holder and I have no power.  What the?  The batteries were completely dead out of the package.  Go figure.  I put them in the Energizer charging base that I already had.  The base tells me they are completely dead and will take a few hours.  NO!!!  I guess that was a sign to go to bed.

I wake up in this Morning to check on the batteries and they are fully charged.  Perfect.  Let me remind you it was late the night before and apparently I wasn't thinking straight.  To get the Arduino Mega 2560 to boot up properly with external power, you need at least 7V.  I only had 4.8V coming in.  So I had to put this to the side till I make another run later today to get some more supplies.

While I made my late night run, I grabbed a cheap soldering iron to do some minor work here and there while I troubleshoot and get everything laid out for Butler.  When I start putting the final project together, I'll get the proper tools to do the job correctly.  When I ordered my wireless WiFly module, I almost got the Electret microphone to use for Butler to hear the voice commands.  I soldered on three different colored cables to connect to the breadboard and adjusted my previous sketch and BitVoicer program to listen to the external microphone rather than the laptop's microphone.  I wanted to get this done ASAP as for some reason the microphone on this laptop was not doing the project justice.  With no issues at all, the microphone is working perfectly.  I even tried it from a distance and no flaws!  Once I get the external power setup, I will create a video to show the last three things done to the Butler project.  Maybe tomorrow I'll have a video for you all to view.

Here's a few photos in the meantime:

 

 

Not a Good Day

On Tuesday, I received the wireless module and separate microphone for Butler.  I'll need to get a soldering iron for the microphone and I'm sure there is more soldering in the future.  I can't put a robot together with just a bread board.  I mean I could but I'm not going to.  The bread board is only meant for prototyping and keeps everything clean while testing.

Well yesterday, 8/7/2013, I spent a good 11 hours working on the wireless connectivity of Butler.  After spending all that time retracing my steps, I come to find out that I had a Dead on Arrival (DOA) part.  I'm not going to lie, I was pretty upset and by the end of the day, I had a headache coming on from all the head scratching trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.  So, now I have to wait for the supplier's response to see how to resolve this issue in a timely manner.

In the meantime, I'm going to work on doing a video about the Butler project.  This will be about a week long project I'm assuming for what I'd like to have in the video.  Thanks for reading!