After stuggling in the mud for the past week or so with compiler issues, I’ve finally broken free!

I have a newly configured breadboard, with enough room for four slave ICs, each handling ten LEDs. I haven’t found a decent way to create more than a double row of leds, given the way a breadboard is laid out electrically. I fear I’ll be making some PCBs for this endeavour shortly.

I’ve come up with a neat bit of code to set the address on my slaves, using a single pin. With one pin, I can actually set up to 127 different addresses, however I’ve got it capped at 16 for now. A buddy of mine suggested the idea of using diodes as or gates, for reading a bit shifted across the 8-bit port on the pic. So with between 0 and 4 diodes as a mutliple input single output OR gate, I can read any binary number between 0 and 15 (0000 to 1111) with a single pin, which happens to be the only one left!

I’ve also found the hundreds of cheap’o LEDs I ordered from a popular auction site aren’t well suited to this application. I believe this is because of their tight lense angle of 20°. The leds I was using prior to this had an angle of 45° and I’m now using heavy-duty piranha leds with an angle of 70°. I’m going to look into getting more of the 45 deg leds, I think that angle offers the best combination of a focused upward beam but still allowing enough off-axis light back in.

I think now that I have the sensors returning data the way I want, I need to work on applications to interpret that data and do something useful with it.

As soon as I remember to recharge my camera battery, I’ll have some more pictures.