Project Complete

I finally overcame the problem of how to counter the gap between each character. I was looking through some of the coding from the Arduino sketchbook and then stumbled on to something that made me think. I saw this:

Break;

It seemed to do the trick in this sketch so why not on my one, it wouldn’t hurt to try. So I decided to have the Arduino encode for me the characters “ABBA”, and then in the code where the characters and their Morse code had been defined I added the ‘break;’ expression only after the letter A. this way I would know if it worked because after the letter A I would notice a short gap before the next letter but not see one when the letter B was output.

Surprise Surprise it worked!

The whole thing was working flawlessly; the characters were being encoded perfectly by the led, the break between the characters was long enough to be noticeable but not so long that it made you think the next dot/dash was part of the previous character.

I kept being paranoid and double checking all the dots and dashes to make sure that the lights were outputting the code correctly because I would probably lose my sanity if after all this found out that the whole thing works except the coding/lighting was wrong. Luckily it was working fine and I felt accomplished from witnessing it (numerous times).

I took a short recording of it in action (restricted due to memory card size), you can see it below.

Final artifact in action. Tada!