Week 05 - One Month Project Underway

This week was all about getting some new things in place on the admin side for my family's oscar voting website. The video pretty much explains everything, but in summary things are moving right along.

Week 04 - More Arduino and 1 Month Project Initiated

So I moved onto Arduino tutorial part 2 where you work with multiple LEDs. The goal was to get to through the whole tutorial and then mess around and see what can be done with it. So once I completed the circuit, and finished the first program, I then followed on instructions on how to improve it. Then after that I modified it myself and had some fun.

Very interesting to discover that there are only 6 digital pins that allow for analog dimming. The six pins are identifiable with a ~ symbol next to it. For whatever reason they are all not grouped together. Instead its pins 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, and 11.

The final result was showing 4 different light patterns (technically 5 if you count the blinking separator) each separated by a series of blinking lights. You can check out the videos once they are posted here. Next week I plan to finish more than one tutorial, but I needed to get a leg up on a family project where we all vote on the oscars, and I run a small site for it.

This family oscar voting project always gets improved every year, but only a little bit at a time. So this year I have an advantage and am including it into mustang so I can get some things done that are long overdue. The code is old, and parts were hard-coded due to time constraints. The worst part is its documentation which I also plan to improve, but also I hope to make it much more automatic so that much time no longer needs to be invested into every year.

So this week I read through the existing database and initial pages. I also built new pages to handle the data entry for this years nominees and prepped the tables in the database. The first goal was to handle adding what I call a nominee group. I have this working properly but plan on extending its functionality with new ways of adding the data and checking against it.