Today at 6:30PM GMT I was close to tears of joy. After spending nearly 7 hours in the lab today plus probably a further 20 hours on previous days I finally got my code to read a keypad working!  I tried four different methods of coding the same routine none of which worked properly, that is until I discovered that something very strange was going on with regards to some rather odd earthing problems.

I would not be touching the desk, the unit or the computer and I would move and the LED's that were showing the value that the keypad should be picking up would change but then if I earthed myself to the computer then it wouldn't do it. So I earthed the metal keypad, which I had also changed from an earlier plastic one that didn't seem to behave, and then I added some 10kΩ resistors between the row outputs of the pic and earth and I'm not sure of the technical explanation but it well...works!

I just hope I go into the lab tomorrow and it still wants to play ball. I finally feel like I have something other than just research to talk about in my interim report! And while I did get a helping hand in terms of suggesting that I de-bounce the switch I did the work with the coding of it all and I found out all the little earthing things...It felt really satisfying to actually solve a problem! Still thanks Mr Bell for you help with suggesting the de-bouncing and the new keypad! 

Now it's onto the report, which I hope will be finished and handed in on Thursday. 2,000, about 630 already written. 

It's been a while since I've said anything about this so I thought I should add something.  The deadline for the interim report is at the end of the week and I'm still a little concerned that I don't have enough in the way of work to show for the amount of time that I have had so far.  While I have done a lot of research I did intend to get the hardware designed and built before the holidays, however this has not happened. I have not managed to even come up with a design!

On the advice of my project supervisor I changed tact and went for a software angle first of all.  I have since been looking at how the chips work and other such information as well as trying to write a piece of code that will read the matrix keypad that I will be using.

Unfortunately I can't seem to get the program to work outside of a simulator. While the simulations on PC of the three different code versions, which employ three different methods of reading the keypad, have all been successful once transferred to the PIC they don't seem to behave as well in real life.

I will be spending some substantial time during the course of tomorrow on the project and will hopefully get further than I did during the time spent on Friday - where I was in the lab from 9:30AM until 3:00PM with no development or improvement!

I will also continue writing the project report tomorrow evening.  

Well, it seems that it takes longer to research into a project that I thought. My planning says that I should be designing and building the hardware this week, however that hasn't happened. I have completed more research on both the DMX512 standard, after finally receiving a copy of the official standard plus researched into the LCD display and how it is driven from a software aspect as well as how to interface the keypad with the PIC.

In sort I'm behind from my plan but in hindsight I believe that conducting the research in the time that I allocated for research was inadequate. I believe I am still on track and have plenty of time to complete my objectives before the interim report due in just before Christmas.