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Tuesday 9 October 2012

Another day working with the IR remote

Me and my friend Robin continued working on the remote control idea today. Unfortunately no pictures were taken since I'm still running a Jelly Bean ROM on my phone so the camera still doesn't work.

We started with making sure the ON/OFF function was functioning properly and it did. It appears we had connected the LED wrong last week.

Then we started experimenting with a stepping motor. Turning a potentiometer with a servo isn't a very good idea, but using a stepping motor is really cool. A stepping motor needs four transistors. Finding the right NPN-transistors proved to be somewhat of a challenge but after some searching we found some. We didn't have time for much more than connecting everything to the Arduino board and trying some different codes from the library to make it move. It did move, but we aren't sure yet if the coils are connected properly since we have no idea which are which. We will have to find that out next week.

During the evening I also tried soldering surface mounted components with a hot air gun. It was pretty simple actually. Starting with applying some kind of liquid solder to the pads with a little "pistol". Then place all the tiny components as they are supposed to sit. Then it was a simple as to just take the hot air gun and hold it over the components for a couple of seconds and you could see the solder melting, soldering the components to the board. Afterwards I measured all the joints with a DMM and only one out of ~25 had to be resoldered, which I'd say is good since it was my first try at it. This had nothing to do with the remote control though, this is for an alarm/lock system for the building we're using (Kulturbanken 2.0).

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