Twitter – PSP (java) – Arduino (Peggy2)

Pictures of the final installation, WORKING !

Final installation, on the kitchen table...

… so it all started, after I managed to make my Peggy2 LED board work, and I was wondering what to do with it…?

What else more obvious than display Twitter messages on it?

Now here’s the high level “design”:

- Peggy2 board with an Arduino microcontroller on it, should receive data serially, either over wire or IR

- how to get the data from the internet ? I don’t want to use a ethernet shield or wireless one, and it turns out I’ve been for so long annoyed that I have a PSP lying around and not being used… So let’s use it, it has wireless and can be programmed in Java (J2ME) be using the PSPKVM (greaaaat job guys !)

So there are 2 problems:

1) program the PSP to connect to the internet and download tweets from there

2) communicate between the PSP and the Arduino on Peggy

1) PSP to twitter.com

initial screen

Peggy 2.2 LED pegboard

1hour and plenty of tinkering around the board…

When I press on the U4, all of a sudden the whole 1st row lights up…

But then it becomes very dim and FLASHES…. luckily I remembered what I read yesterday on the forum: to short L1 or L2… and it WORKS !!!

So to summarise there seem to be 2 problems, hiding each other:

1) the U4 has a connection problem. I don’t know exactly what, I’ll try to re-solder it, but when I press on one of the corners it works properly…

2) L2 that I installed seems to be causing very dim lights and flashing… just shorting L1 (as per the forum’s instructions) seems to fix it

Finally….

Now thanks to some (very) helpful and quick reply from one of the “gurus” at EvilMadScientist, I’ve started testing the U4, one of the 2 STP16DP05 LED drivers.

I switched it with U5 but the symptoms remained exactly the same.

I’ve checked the pins of the circuit and, with an OhmMeter, the connection between the front and the back, for every single one of the 24 pins…