Note to Self - Remember the resistor!

In between other duties I managed to put together the circuit described in the MERG journal but it didn't quite work correctly. As I did it on a breadboard instead of the stripboard as I wanted a temporary setup, possibly there was an incorrect wiring. Any way while I was mucking around with this I thought about checking the semaphore lamp after I had painted it black (as per quite a few prototype photos I found on the Net) to reduce the 'through plastic' brightness. I quickly wired up the 9V battery and the lamp glowed pretty brightly. A bit TOO brightly before dimming rapidly. What just happened I thought? Then it dawned on me, the RESISTOR! I forgot the resistor hence the extreme lighting. Damn! However it didn't completely stuff up the LED and there was a dim glow once I put a low resistor (68ohms) on the +ve wire. Not to worry as this was the experimental kit. I can always position the semaphore so that the lamp isn't seen.

Today I decided to connect the servo up to the MERG CBUS servo controller to see if it would work. Yep it did. With a bit of fine tuning with the help of the control software I think it works very well. I also connected up the lamp (with a resistor this time!) to video the movement with illumination. Below is the video.

This week not sure what I will do. Maybe get back to the Raspberry Pi as it has been nearly 3 months since I last mucked around with it (just before Christmas last year in fact!)