Couch to 5km Assistant

Soldering station has been acquired - I purchased a reasonably priced and reasonably well-reviewed station (Sigma 60D) and yesterday picked up some solder other than what I used for plumbing. I also seemed to have acquired a few time slices this evening to solder. I'll post old pictures of attempts versus a sample board that I'm doing before returning to the couch to 5k mate device.

I like this solution and I think I'm going to purchase a better soldering iron, clean up my crap a bit more and try to package it in something useful.

A neighbour and I talked about it and I figure that putting a vibration motor on it with possibly some blinking light indicator might be handy for those who don't like to listen to stuff when they run or...

...wait for it...

...if the the user is deaf.

Yeah - I think I'd like to work those two in.

Done - just in time... :)

Time to crash - it's a long day tomorrow... That was fun - less procrastinating on the next one...

Still further ahead than my first project submission....

Thanks for reading and playing along.

Added update to code.

I had a craptacular reminder that I can't solder worth beans with the stuff I have. So... Sigh...

Oh well - got something kind of cobbled together, kind of works, definitely fails.

Video is 76% uploaded... Grr...

I put the Trinket Pro on a dev board and wired up the jacks. I threw in the token resistor ("Bob" is probably developing a nervous twitch*). I pushed the unaltered (love it) code to the device and heard the tell-tale beeps.

What sucks is that one of my leads broke off of one of the jacks. I'll have to fix that tonight and take some photos...

For a procrastinator, I'm moving faster than I expected...

:)

* "Bob" is a tried-and-true hardware guy that I worked with and he'd get nervous when I'd just throw shit together and apply power. He'd cringe, walk away, turn red and advise me not to do that. So I like to throw a resistor into the equation just for his sake. Well that and it makes the one headphone earbud not sound so loud with the beeping.

I uploaded the audio test (left/right) to github. I put in an audacity Audacity link (opens in new tab) project so people can reconstruct that simple test or modify to their heart's content. Time to start thinking about the other stuff I need to do...

So I got off my lazy butt and wired up the tone generator (from the arduino) and an mp3 player and listened to music while my tone generator was running. Next up: trinket pro magic...

Schematics? Sigh. Yes. Soon.

Button selector? Soon.

More code???? Yes - possibly sooner...

Between work and home obligations, things have been a little tight for project work. So this morning I soldered up some headphone jacks that I had, did simple continuity tests on them, wired them into a protoboard, and gave them a whirl.

They're not the best jacks - there was some left bleed and right bleed (but that could have been the audio test that I was trying - I'll use audacity later to come up with definitive test sounds).

They worked! Okay - so later today, more testing, then some measurements, some resistors, and a check on the music output with my sound pattern.

I threw some code together and pushed up the initial attempt to github. Going to change from eagle to kicad - updating the repository...

I hooked up one of the 3.5mm jacks that I had (although I want a smaller profile device) and used the simple toneMelody code for the Arduino. It worked but now I'm thinking that a pot might be advisable for adjusting the volume. I got to thinking about that too and I'm going to have to dust off the research tools to re-think the connecting circuit. Methinks that some resistors are going to be needed and an added pot might affect that in some fashion... ;)

Bob would be impressed that I'm using resistors. :)

This page will help me in my quest: http://www.rane.com/note109.html (opens in new tab)