Okay so today I gotta tell you about this project I called F1-130AR. Messed around with it for weeks, almost drove me nuts.
The Idea Was Simple… At First
Right, wanted this little gadget to track how bright the light is in different parts of my workbench. Figured some light sensors hooked up to a controller board could spit out numbers to my laptop. Basic stuff, yeah? Ordered a bunch of parts online, waited like forever.
Getting My Hands Dirty
Box finally arrived. Ripped it open, dumped everything out on the table. Grabbed my soldering iron because most stuff wasn’t socketed. Smelled like burnt plastic pretty quickly – guess I held the iron on one chip too long. Whoops. Solder blobs everywhere too, looked messy. Scraped some off with my old pocket knife.
Screwed four sensors onto a strip of wood using tiny wood screws. Took ages trying to make them straight. Spoiler: they weren’t totally straight. Plugged wires into my board. Shoved that whole contraption near the window where the light changes a lot.
The Software Headache
Fired up my laptop. Thought reading the sensor data would be easy-peasy. Wrong. Opened the code editor. Typed some stuff. Hit run. Nothing. Tried again. Still nothing. Got zero readings for like an hour. Felt like banging my head on the keyboard.
- Tore the wiring apart, checked every stupid connection. One wire was loose in the breadboard. Fixed that.
- Downloaded some different driver thing someone mentioned in a forum post three years old. Prayed it worked.
- Changed the code… AGAIN. Added some delay thing someone said might help.
Hit run one more time, half expecting smoke. Numbers! Actual numbers finally showed up! Felt like winning the lottery, honestly.
It Lives! (Kinda)
Finally got numbers popping up on my screen! Moved my hand over one sensor, saw the number drop. Sweet! Put my phone flashlight on another one, numbers jumped up. Cool! But… the sensors on the ends gave numbers that seemed way off compared to the middle ones. Still got bugs, obviously.
Stuck my little light monitor rig on the edge of the sink for the afternoon. Watched the numbers crawl up and down as the sun moved outside. Took a screenshot, felt kinda proud even though it’s held together with solder and probably wishful thinking. Saved the messy code under “f1-130ar_FINAL_working_v2b”. Definitely not finished yet. More coffee needed before tackling those end sensors…
