I’ve returned to playing in the electronics realm by putting together a home automation project. We use a Taylor Water Stove as a heating system. It really could use some monitoring and automation. After reading about the Arduino a bit I’ve decided to dive in and see what I can do with it.
To start with I ordered an XDRduino UNO and an LCD Shield from dxsoul.com. These took a little while to arrive from overseas, but it was worth the wait.
I connected the LCD to the UNO, loaded the example sketch from the Arduino.cc web site and … it failed.
I looked on the DXSoul website comments and realized that this display (It is a DFRobot one) uses a different set of ins than that of the example – easy fix.
I then turned my attention to the buttons -err keypad – I found that the DFRobot website pointed to a driver that someone wrote some time ago. I loaded that up and it failed to even compile. A bit disheartening. There was no mention of the buttons on the DX site.
I dissected the library and found a number of syntax and logic errors. I corrected those and now it recompiled – yay! When I ran the sample program it did not detect the keys. I found the circuit diagram on the DFRobot site which helped me understand how the library works. It turns out that when a button is pressed (except for the reset button) it makes a connection with a particular resistor. Each resistor allows for a different analog value to show up on the a0 pin (from 0 to 1023). So, I was able to display this value and then re-calibrate the driver so that the keys are now detected. Woohoo.