Arduino – SOMO interfacing:

• Got a basic melody to play on the arduino by following this tutorial:  http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Tone

• Was originally going to communicate with the SOMO 14D by using the push-button operations using the digital outs of the arduino because it only has one serial port.  There were a few problems with this approach.

1. Takes many digital outputs to control one SOMO
2. Cannot easily switch between tracks which are not right next to each other
3. Hard to control active-low switches without the use of a gate

• The solution is of course to use serial.  But one port is not enough for even a 2 finger prototype.  Lucky there is a way to make the other digital ports act like serial ports using the SoftwareSerial library.  An example of how this can be done is found here:  http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/SimpleSoftwareSerial
• Was not sure if the regulated 3.3 volt port on the arduino would work for the SOMO.  Found out it puts out 50ma and the SOMO’s peak consumption is 45ma.  This should work for one but we will probably need a 3.3v voltage regulator for any others.  Sparkfun(http://www.sparkfun.com/products/526) sells them so we can get them when we get the other SOMOs.  The ones sparkfun sells can output up to 800ma so one would be all we need to power all the SOMOs.  I think a decoupling capacitor on the power input protects the circuit from receiving too many amps.  The wiki article was a bit confusing on this matter.  I will read it a bit more in depth and ask Clift if I can’t figure it out.
• An interesting article on unregulated power supplies: http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/103
• Formatted uSD to have 16-bit fat file system.  Also changed some music files to .ad4 and copied them to the uSD.
• Should be ready to wire up the SOMO tomorrow.  The SOMO data sheet is poorly organized which has held me back a little bit.  I do not want to fry the thing out of carelessness.  Hopefully our memory card works, its not on the definitely doesn’t work list so that is good.

MISC:

• You can now scan to email with the printer.  The e-mail portion wasn’t working before because they changed the server after we moved here.  Now instead of using mail.fgm.com:25 we use spam.fgm.com:25.  This is the only easy way to scan documents for Windows 7 machines which do not have the HP Solution center software yet.