Sign #2 Complete

I also made a slight change to the G to improve legibility.  Hopefully I'll finish the 3rd tomorrow.

Arduino Mega, with Serial1, wireless and memory card, plus enclosure

So today I got the arduino mega hooked up, ran the wires to the spi inputs for the Mega (53,52,51,50), attached a shield so after I do my final tests I can solder the wires in permanently, hooked up the xbee and 18 led matrixes.  It's working great, on external power it boots up everytime and read the memory card data and the pushed to the displays. Also, yesterday all of the pieces for my housing came in.  TAP Plastics did a great job of cutting everything and keeping everything organized.  Now we'll just need to create a template for drilling the holes, and start assembly.  Is that a light at the end of the tunnel I see?

Micro SD Trials and Tribulations

So I decided I needed some sort of fall back plan if the wireless system to the sign goes down for a significant period of time. While browsing the internet I came across this MicroSD shield from Sparkfun.com .  I thought it would be just as easy and hooking up a few wires and bam I'd be saving away on the card.  Well it should have been.  But I struggled all day with this. I could get it to recognize the card, finally I was able to write to the card with the library that sparkfun had on their site.  However I couldn't read to it. I found all sorts of great libraries for FAT16 file systems out on the internet, but most had the wiring to the arduino done differently.  Even if I went into the code of the library to change the pin setup it still wouldn't work.  I couldn't understand why sparkfun had the final pin to the micro SD holder go to pin 8 instead of 10 like everyone else.  So this morning I rewired the shield to my arduino and low and behold we're writing and aving info just like that.  Almost made yesterday worth it, almost.  I wouldn't hesitate purchasing the shield from sparkfun I would however be aware that it isn't going to sit properly on top of your arduino.  You'll have to think of some other wiring system.