LOCAL Colorado Music Group needs help using Pro Mini

Development Boards Arduino
1

Hello Sparkfun community,

I am having trouble with an Arduino Pro Mini pulling data from an SD card, and sending it over the serial port via UART to a Colorduino, an 8x8 RGB LED Driver. The system will play a few animations, and then freeze. The interesting thing is, when we try with an Arduino Uno, it doesn’t freeze. I know there is another Atmel chip connected to the serial port of the Uno, but I’m not sure if it affects pins 0 and 1 as it does the USB port. We can’t actually use an Uno in the system, because there are 32 of these setups and an Uno is too expensive. Not to mention we already bought 32 Pro Mini’s from Sparkfun…

Here is the code we are using:

Pro Mini: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0ktdzo12480v … roller.ino

Colorduino:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0ktdzo12480v … LISTEN.ino

(Colorduino webpage here: http://imall.iteadstudio.com/im120410004.html)

Is there anything we can do to fix this problem easily? An extra timeout loop or something?

Anyone who has read this far might want a better explanation of the system itself:

There are 32 props for a 7 minute long performance show that contain the following: A Colorduino drives an 8 by 8 RGB LED matrix, connected by serial to an Arduino Pro Mini, that is tied to an Adafruit cc3000 Wifi shield by SPI bus that has an SD card. (Phew! that’s a lot. And sorry I had to buy Adafruit it was the cheapest one and Sparkfun’s cc3000 wasn’t out yet.) Each cc3000 receives a UDP broadcast packet from a Wireless router controlled by a laptop running code in processing that is found here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0ktdzo12480v … LaptopPort

Please ask questions, and thanks for any tips! These props are to be used in a competition show in Ohio later this week, and the group is the Blue Knights, who represent the state of Colorado. If we can get help from Sparkfun or the forums, I’m sure we can share some media of the groups success for SparkFun to use in promoting the use of the Pro Mini and the company in general. Thanks so much.

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Let me see if I understand the problem setup first. The lappy sends some message via Wifi to the Arduino(s) which are connected to a Colorduino driving an 8x8 RGB matrix. There’s also a SD card attached for some reason. When you have a single Arduino and it’s an Uno … all is well. It runs w/o mishap for the full 7 minutes. When you have a single Arduino and it’s an ProMini … all is not well. It runs for some period of time and then stops ? How long does it run for ? Is this consistent from run to run ? What’s the SD card do ? I will guess that the animation data is stored there and the WiFi connection only sends a command to execute animation #1, #2, etc. Am I correct ? You think the PM - SD card interface is the problem because ?? I will assume you somehow know that the PM is getting the command properly.