Quiz Box from hell
Disclaimer
Yes. A lot of fsckups were made, a lot of things I still don't understand; in fact it's good to have this thing finished, now let's never ever look at it again :-)
The main reason for even writing this is not to have to buy anyone a 2010.04-beer for not doing wiki-update.
But what is it?
Simple quiz-button thing:
- 2 buttons can be connected to 'box' through wries
- distinct sound is played for whichever player pushes the fastest
- short immune-/lock-period after someone pressed their button, to let quizmaster do his talk
Good, and how is this causing Trouble?
Things that went wrong, in this order (all PEBCAK-caused of course):
- ISP-programming wouldn't work for some reason, has never worked, eventually forgot about it and played disk jockey with MCU in/out of sockets
- STK500 began to act flakey, I think it's at the end of its prolonged life, may it rest in pieces
- burned resistor at base of driving transistor due to thinko
- made 2 PSU's instable (prolly) due to switching of high current, causing cursing, hair-pulling and in general dissatisfaction
- spontaneous buzzing sounds because of disabled brownout-detect on MCU
- spontaneous buzzing sounds because of fscked up adapter-connector
- spontaneous buzzing sounds because of short spikes/dips on button-wire
- code to program tunes, software UART, serial interface didn't fit into 1k (without wasting too much time)
Nice Things
But ok, in the end it works; software waits for button A/B being pressed for 25ms continuously, and if so, plays 'beeeep', or 'beep-beep' for A and B respectively.
Fitting all into the casing was also nice; some mild woodwork, drilling, working with Dremel(tm), glueing, and then some. It actually looks presentable; the on/off-button in particular is very nice to work with - I'll use it again some time.
Software is so extremely simple I CBA to put it somewhere; it's pretty obvious.
Also try having some fun -- Michai