This weekend didn’t afford me enough time for personal projects, but I did have a few moments to solder connections onto the LED system on the RC police car I’ve been modifying. (I also drilled out the rear window).

Controlling the LEDs is simple: they  all share a positive terminal, bring a cathode to ground and you have light. Controlling the lights via an MSP430 is simple – set the connected pin to be an output, and set the pin low. The LED board has built in resistors, so there’s no need to add them.

There are 8 LEDs, 4 of which are independently controlled:

1. The two (2) Headlights and two (2) Brake lights
2. The Blue lightbar
3. The White lightbar on the left
4. The White lightbar on the right
5. The Red lightbar

With the soldering of connectors finished, I hooked them up to the Launchpad and made a quick modification to the Hackaday.com Hello World program –  this time  setting 5 pins as outputs, and turning on all the lights except the blue and white lightbar on the left. I toggle the entire lightbar approximately every ~6th of a second.

The specific pins to control each light will definitely change in the future, but seeing blinky lights in the meantime is always fun. I’m happy with my choice of this particular RC car – having 8 LEDs makes it real easy to display status codes and will definitely help with debugging later.

Next up: connect a PING sensor to  a small servo to the roof … once my box of servos arrive.

I’m in the middle of reading MSP430 Microcontroller Basics, which I’d picked up for some insight into the inner workings of the MSP430 line from Texas Instruments (especially the MSP30G2231, one of the controllers included with the Launchpad Emulator board). Unfortunately this coincides with a lot of overnight work at the office, so I’m still making progress (albeit slowly) with the RC Car modification and rebuild.

In the past few weeks, I’ve done a bit of work/learning with a couple of Parallax sensors  – namely the PIR and the PING. I’ve ripped out the stock board and replaced it with a SN754410E Quad half H-bridge, and began cleaning up some of the poor solder joints. More on all of this in a few weeks, but in the meantime let’s tryout my new Toshiba Camileo X30 (sorry about the low light) and Cinelerra, and look at using the MSP430’s TimerA for pulse width modulation:

More in a few weeks…