What's Been and What's Ben

All the scientist’s studies can not change being an idiot. The TLC5940 LED driver chip – the bane of my existence – works now. That would have been useful last quarter when I really could have used them working for my senior design project instead of having microcontrollers (little computer on a chip) power the LEDs directly. To keep what I did wrong technically brief; I wired the LEDs based on assumptions I made that were incorrect, facing the wrong direction and attached to ground instead of the high voltage. My thought process was trying to think in terms of what I would do if I were designing the chip for my purposes. That and the manual is never very clear. Not until in a session of self-hatred for my failure I stumbled onto a forum that had someone mention that the wiring was strange for some people. Within my head contains just enough knowledge to know what is going on, but now exactly what is happening.

I spent hours debugging code, when I should have been focusing on the physical circuit elements that can only be wired four ways. I think had I stepped back and taken in what was going on I would have caught the problem in time. This does open up the idea of making a second iteration for the department – a legacy for me and Ramzi to leave behind. We are thinking smaller, all surface mounted, more LEDs, a better motor, smaller mounting area, way better programming, and cheaper overall cost. I am not an idiot, merely incompetent.