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Race to the finish!

A project log for Toddler's Cyberdeck

I'm building a cyberdeck for my son. He just turned 2.

joshJosh 08/13/2023 at 05:040 Comments

I've been busy and it has been difficult to find time to work on this, and even more difficult talking the time to log progress.

The majority of work was all in the wiring. I got delayed a little when I realized I didn't have enough... or any... resistors properly sized for the LEDs.  After a few calculations I settled on 75ohm for the blue and green(I thought) LEDs and 150 ohm for the red and yellow. (Hindsight as I'm writing this... I could have checked the forward voltage of the LEDs with my cheap multimeter which has a diode test function... Oh well). I ordered some online and got them a few days later.

After trying both of the resistors on each LED, I ended up using the 150ohm on all but the one blue led. 

I had a difficult time deciding how to handle the power supply I bought. Unfortunately it has a push button switch to make it turn on with one press and off with two presses. I wanted to use a micro switch to turn it on when open and off when shut but that is not compatible with the power supply. So I simply added one more switch to the board for power, directly solder to the power supply.

Another odd thing about this power supply is that it will shut itself off if there is low current for something like 30 sec. This will actually let me add a timeout code to the Arduino to shut off all the LEDs after a few minutes of inactivity. Hopefully that will drop the current draw below the threshold and it will shut off. Then it won't be drawing power when my son puts it down. 

Shots below. (Again, not in any reasonable order)

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