In week 4 of the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge, our team continues to hack away on our group response system. The theme of this week has been figuring out how to fit all the puzzle pieces together.
Although we have a lot of coders on our team, most of us are new to microcontroller programming, so many of our work nights have focused on "here's how to write C for an AVR, compile it, and program a chip." Let's just say there have been a lot of blinking LEDs here at i3 Detroit lately. Ladyada's AVR Tutorial has been particularly helpful.
We've also been working on figuring out how handle radio communication with our ZigBee and USB communication. We wound up scrapping our ATMega48 for an ATMega16A in order to get more I/O pins and for better power/clock compatibility with the ZigBee and USB. Our new micros arrived today, so we're hard at work trying to turn our blinking LED into a radio-controlled blinking LED.
We also found a few libraries that we hope will help handle the low level radio and USB communication. In particular, we're looking at the Chibi library from freaklabs, and the V-USB library.
We'll have a video update next week with some juicy shots of our hardware-in-progress, but for week 4 we've decided to keep you in suspense while we hunker down to work.
