W2: LED Prototypes and Wireless Headaches

More Preliminary Prototyping

The TheraTapper uses three potentiometers for adjusting three settings: length, intensity, and pause. Length controls motor duration, intensity controls the strength, and pause…is confusing me at this point. My understanding was that it adjusts the delay after a vibration.

Say you have it set to have a 2 second vibration and a 1 second pause. The left side would buzz for 2 seconds, then stop for one second while the right side activates. But then the left side would start up again before the right side is done and everything gets mixed up. An example that is similar to this scenario is when you’re at a stop light and looking at the turn signals of two cars. Sometimes they’ll be in sync, and then they’ll be slightly off from one another, then they’re going at opposing times, and then they’re fully in sync again.

I don’t recall the TheraTapper working this way. Unfortunately, I don’t have one available to me to figure out what I’m missing. I have reached out to Lisa Jellison, the therapist who I am working with on this, to explain how it works. A response is pending.

That all said, I put together a circuit with two LEDs and three potentiometers to get started on figuring out how to set up the code. And that’s where I discovered the aforementioned problem that broke my brain a little. The circuit I used can be seen below. It (mostly) works - yay. I still don’t know what to do with the third potentiometer yet though.

Xbee

For getting started, I’ve been attempting to follow an Instructables guide (found here). This has been tricky, and I still have had no success. Once I figured out how to get both Xbee boards figured out (which took an embarrassingly long time), I got the circuits set up exactly as they should be, uploaded the provided code, and…nothing. The LED remains dark and sad. And now when I try reuploading the receiver code, the Arduino keeps getting stuck uploading forever and never stopping.

Next week will be spent continuing to figure out how to make the Xbees communicate correctly.