Snow at Copper

Sometimes you spend your days building signs.  Other times you do this.

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?

2 sets running wireless

I've got the beginner and intermediate trails running and parsing their select data from the wireless feed. It seems like power will not be and issue at all.

16!

So I spent the 2nd half of the day cleaning up my code and adding a few more matrixes. We're up to 16 running off of one Arduino Delimouve. Power seems steady everything is at the same lighting level. Pretty psyched. So with the big map I'll either have to use a 2 Megas (one for green and one for bolue trails, as they have more that 16 trails statuses that we display) or find out if I can use the analog pins to drive the matrixes also. I have doubts about that one. Tomorrow I'll probably hook a mega up and try to hook up another set of 4. Final step of this project will be

1. Figure out layout of all 3 boards

2. Finalize housing for system

3. Finalize wireless process

4. Create code from snow reporting system to update the sign

5. Hard wire everything and mount.