Arduino Resetting

[muonide]

I've got the Ground Station Tracker up and running alright now but have ran into an annoying issue.  Whenever I hit the "Update Settings" button I end up back in the IMU calibration routine.  I think the program's creating a new serial connection upon that action which then auto-resets the arduino.  I've seen some examples of people putting a cap between RST & GND to stop that auto-reset; I'm thinking that may be my next step.  I can't think of any other reason why it would lose its calibration status when I hit the update settings button. Presumably it's running arduinoGround() which then initializes the serial connection again.

Anybody else have that issue?

[Skylar MSGC]

Here at Montana State Uni we just run the calibration steps when we update and start up the code. Tying the reset pin to ground with a cap would be a pretty good idea though. When we were testing the calibration and experimenting with getting it calibrated quickly we weren't too worried about the reset, but that would come in handy if we happen to get a very precise calibration on arduino. This way if we wanted to reset the groundstation we wouldn't need to hope that our next calibration is just as precise. We added a LCD screen to the arduino on the ground station that slides onto the groundstation rail. This way we can see what the values of each calibration variable are, which makes it very convienient for setting up in the field.

The library that we use for our backlit LCD is the LiquidCrystal library, if you wanted to get something like this set up here is a example.
www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HelloWorld

You could also use a OLED display to show the values that you want, which if you find a OLED that you want usually on the same page there will be a github link to download the library to communicate and display on it.

Overall I think these steps might help with deploying in the field along with keeping the reset from dropping when you re-access the serial port. I would still think about resetting it if you have setup the ground station for prolonged amount of time during just a testing phase and your writing new code to it. I TA here at our uni for a class that is currently using arduino for their final project and sometimes the UNOs don't want to communicate with the computer if it has been powered with multiple serial communications. Which just a simple power cycle on the arduino fixes that. These incidents seemed to be linked to the students that rewrite their code alot for experimenting with hardcoded values for their project. While the students that think about their code and use a little forethought which in turn lets that rewrite less times to the arduino before accomplishing their task seem to never run into this problem.

This is, of course, just speculation but this trend has been pretty consistant with the students so far.