Trinket/Soldering Question

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emiskilla03
 
Posts: 26
Joined: Thu Apr 03, 2014 8:30 pm

Trinket/Soldering Question

Post by emiskilla03 »

For any of you that have read any of my recent posts I'm working on a lamp project using breadboard friendly neopixels. My soldering skills aren't the greatest, my prototype on the breadboard worked flawlessly. I then soldered in my neopixels and jumpers to connect them all onto 4 different circuit boards. I'm making a box with the square circuit boards. Each neopixel on one board. My first time soldering it together I was using a cheap pen-style iron. Needless to say it wasn't great and only two pixels out of the four worked. So I decided to desolder everything, purchase a nicer iron (trakpower solder station) and I am happy with my purchase of the new station. My solder joints look a lot nicer now and I redesigned the layout for connect each board to the next. After soldering everything into the boards I was ready to connect the boards together. I wasn't able to test each neopixel before connecting the boards together (I did test each one after desoldering them though). I can't see any kind of solder bridges, but the pins are very close together- so I'm sure there's one somewhere that I'm not seeing. However, when I first tested the 'finished' project the trinket worked fine (it went through it's boot loading period) but no neopixels worked. So I unplugged the trinket from my MBP and pulled out my multimeter (an older digital kind Sperry DM-350A) and put it on the continuity setting to look for shorts/bridges. My multimeter doesn't beep but instead shows a 1 when the leads aren't touching and when the leads touch it shows some value and decreases fairly quickly to 0. While testing connections of the neopixels I'd get the expected 0 however other times I'd get some kind of value other than 1 and 0 when I would've been expecting a 1. Like I'd put one lead on the data In solder joint and the other on the say ground or + solder joint. I'm a complete beginner when it comes to electronics like this. After going through and not finding anything helpful with the multimeter (I did find a broken wire- I fixed it). Now when I plug the trinket in I don't get any response from it. My MBP (running Yosemite) tells me that the USB port is disabled because a device is drawing too much power- to unplug it to re-enable usb ports. So would a short/bridge in my circuit be causing this? I decided to load the same sketch onto my Uno and I just held the 5v, ground, and data wires from the Uno onto the first neopixel of the circuit and the lights on the Uno would turn off and I'd get the same message on my MBP. Any thoughts would greatly be appreciated!

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hiduino
 
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Joined: Sat Sep 01, 2012 7:05 pm

Re: Trinket/Soldering Question

Post by hiduino »

If your USB port shutdown then there is definitely a short or mis-wire somewhere.

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