Second time with the ADC

Seems like someone's been on a shopping spree. After the half yearlies we were greeted in the lab with new ADCs, LCDs and of course wire strippers.

Saturday

Replaced the ADC in the previously made circuit. To display the reading, dropped the (disastrous) idea of using LEDs and opted for the LCD. I ended up with a circuit which reminded me of spaghetti. On plugging the µC we noticed it did not have a potential drop of 5V across the Vcc and Gnd but something of the order of 4.8V. Sir suggested we had fried the µC (yet again) and as we had no spares..... had to spend the rest of the day listening to 7th graders asking me "bhaiya yeah kya hai?" (pointing to the spaghetti).

Monday
Ankush and Vishesh worked on the code and finaly managed to make the compiler admit and display "0 Errors ; 0 Warnings".

Teusday
Ankush promplty brought 3 8052s neatly arranged in a round box (and exclaimed with gleaming eyes "teen aur ghar par pade hain"). Even after replacing the µC, the 4.8v potential drop persisted so we tried using a new 7085 voltage regulator IC. This worked like a breeze and the circuit began to work in expected ways. With two hours of school left, the LCD finaly showed us some readings and they changed according to the IR sensor! Now that was a true "tell your grandchildrens" moment. We finally got some indication that we were on the right track. Though in subsequent attempts the LCD displayed nothing at all (i wondered wether i had knocked some wire out, while exclaiming "Booya!"). Using the multimeter me and ankush checked each and every connection while vishesh worked on the code. Found a suspicious connection, but as school was almost over , we packed up and called it a day.

Wednesday
After wracking our brains over what could have gone wrong with the circuit (and sawing a 8052 in half), finally mustered up the will to resolder the "suspicious" connection and it worked!
I had bought my camera so i busied myself in making a video while the dudes worked on displaying the output of all the three sensors on the LCD (right-left-center).
This too worked superbly. All in all was a super day for us.