I have spent this entire week essentially being humbled by a bunch of tiny machines. Turns out all these things needed was a structured delay to allow the scanning of the hall effect sensors to function as intended.
Running down the code we essentially have the setup for the first half, defining constants and setting up pins. We also preemptively turn the transistors off. To those wondering why off for the transistors is a LOW current, the answer is that I don't actually know, that's just kind of how it works. I think it's because we have 5V flowing into the collector so if we raise the base of the transistor to HIGH it counteracts the 5V and turns off the circuit. The loop of the code is essentially just turning the transistors on and off and reading the pins the hall effect sensors go to. Simple stuff. Issue was that we couldn't get them to read properly. Mr. Christy experimented and found that the current of the sensors dropped every time the transistors went on or off, so adding a delay prevented unnecessary reading of signals. The whole test circuit looks pretty similar to last week, but we removed the Neopixels just for ease of testing so the code could just print the variable instead of working with a whole other piece of hardware.
The goal is to incorporate the neopixel sticks next week, along with making a whole 8x8 hall effect array on breadboards as what is essentially a proof of concept. I'll probably transfer over to an ATMega just to have more pins, since this test circuit already uses 4 pins, and I'll need a pin for every transistor, along with pins for every column of hall effect sensors. Here's the functioning progress I've made this week in video form.
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy." - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
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