Building stuff!

Part 1 covered the overview of what I wanted to achieve, while part 2 covered the construction of the hardware. In this third part I’ll give an overview of the software running on the Arduino to coordinate button presses and lights.

But first, some revised diagrams – in part 2 I found that using the D0 and D1 pins for communication with the Grove LED bar was a poor choice, and had to rework things to use D7 and D8. Here’s how that change looks in glorious technicolour diagram form (click to enbiggen):

The software to support this project splits into roughly four pieces:

1. The Arduino sketch (the core code to set up the board, and do something in a loop)
2. Some code to control the LED in the illuminated switch button, and to read button presses
3. Something to implement the overall behaviour of the system.
4. The Grove LED Bar support library, used to control the LED bar

You can find the code for 1, 2, and 3 in this repository in GitHub. I also had to make a few changes to the Grove LED Bar library, and you can find that in this repository, also on GitHub. I won’t delve into the code here in any detail – there’s a lot of documentation in the code, and if you’re interested that will hopefully be sufficient to explain what’s going on in there – other than to note the correspondence between the above-noted code parts and the files in the repository that implement those parts:

1. laundry.ino is the arduino sketch file. This contains the setup code, and the loop() function that fetches events from the switch control code, and passes them to the FSM.
2. SwitchControl.h and SwitchControl.cpp contain the definition and implementation of a C++ class that handles communication with the push button switch and its illumination LED.
3. FSM.h and FSM.cpp contain the ‘brains’ of the project, the Finite-State Machine and the implementation of the various states the system can be in.