Hello everyone!
It’s been a week since I built my BIG BUTTON but I still can’t get it to work normally. I’ve completely dismantled and reassembled it 3 times but it won’t work. At the beginning I already had a lot of trouble uploading the code to my Arduino and now that it’s ok it’s the circuit that I have a problem with. The big button doesn’t blink. What’s strange is that I have only one LED flashing and giving me an output signal (this is the 6th output). I can program it any way I want with the big button and I can even clear what I did. But for the other 5, nothing happens! Reading “BIG BUTTON DIY build - Verified ???” I found this and tested the voltages…
Nothing good guys!!!
I get almost 0v every time. It could be from the 6 track selector that had a shock (I accidentally tapped it…) but the contacts are fine.
Hoping you can help me out!
Thanks
Enoha(I’m French so sorry about the spelling;)
The resistors form a voltage divider, so you should expect the input 5 V to be split into 5 equal parts, as noted in the drawing. If you see 0 V everywhere, either the +5V connection is bad (either not connected or not 5 V), or the switch is broken.
I just did the voltage tests and it’s not a selector problem. Indeed the central pin is not at all connected to the ground of my power supply. And I don’t have a 5v input but it’s 4v. I say 4v to the ground of the power supply.
Is this due to the arduino or to bad wiring?
The central pin should connect to output, not ground. Ground should connect to pin 1 and 5V to pin 6.
Well.
Actually, you should see about 3.0 to 4.2 V on pin 6, if you’ve wired it the way it’s shown. That’s because the way it’s shown is wrong. I believe that’s the way Sam built it, and it works for him, but it won’t give you 5 V at that pin. The problem is that the regulator is connected to VIN on the Arduino and it should not be; it should connect to 5V.
Anyway, whether you have 4V or 5V on rotary pin 6 you should have 4/5, 3/5, 2/5, and 1/5 of that on the other pins. If you don’t then either the switch is broken or you have bad connections to the resistors. If you don’t have any of the above voltages check the resistor between pins 6 and 5; if you have 4/5 but not 3/5 check the resistor between pins 4 and 5; and so on.
No in fact I have 4v between pin 6 of the selector and the gnd pin of the arduino. The 0v I get is between pin 6 of the selector and pin A0 of the arduino.
Right, people say “measure the voltage at point x” to be succinct but really you can’t measure voltage at a point, only voltage differences between two points, and what’s really meant is “measure the voltage difference between point x and ground”. You can measure to the Arduino ground pin although it might be easier to use the ground connection for your power source (- terminal if a battery).
If you try to measure between the switch and pin A0 then either it’s the switch terminal that’s connected to A0, in which case the voltage difference is by definition (practically) zero, or it’s not, in which case the voltage difference is… I dunno, probably will read zero, but anyway nothing useful.
everyone makes that kind of mistake.
