arduinobreadboardwiring
I am trying to get a pushbutton working with the Arduino Button tutorial (and the example sketch). Unfortunately, I was not able to find a button like the one in the example and, instead, have a button with two pins from the bottom. (I don't know if this makes a difference – just trying to provide the information).
Below are pictures of my wiring of my breadboard and Arduino board. Am I doing something wrong here?
To know how things are connected on the Arduino itself you have to take a look at the schematic. This one is the Arduino Uno's. At the bottom right you can see how the board's I/Os are connected to the microcontroller:
So following the line from pin 13 you go to PB5 of the microcontroller. That means bit 5 of port B. If you set that pin to output and make it high you're supplying 5 V to the LED circuit. The series resistor will limit the current to about 5 mA, which is an OK value for the microcontroller.
So, since the 5 V comes from the Arduino's I/O pin the 5 V wire on the breadboard isn't needed.
Its simply your button setup that is the problem. Tie your button pin to ground with the resistor and tie the button from the button pin to vcc.
Best Answer
[facepalm]
So, in case it wasn't obvious from the above question, I am new to the electronics side of the house. In fact, one reason I bought an Arduino breadboard, so I could learn about hardware and become more comfortable with it. (As a software developer, I tend to avoid hardware altogether other than understanding the basics of what is going on in my computer. With the level of abstraction in software these days, that is fairly easy to do.) While I was first going to just delete the question (mostly out of embarrassment), I figured I would share what I just learned so it may help others.
Basically, the reason the above wasn't working is explained in this tutorial by Lady Ada (image reposted below):
In the image, you can see that there is a series of metal strips underneath the board. The long ones (called rails) connect the outside rows. Because of their length, they can connect 25 (or more) column holes at a time. By doing this, it makes it easy to provide power and ground to an entire column and to eventually feed off of for the board.
The shorter strips (called rows) connect strips of 5 holes. This is where I went wrong. I made the (wrong) mistake of thinking the rows were longer and ran all the way across the row. However, if you look at the image below, you can see that strips only run halfway across the board. Because of this, in the setup I had above, anything connected on the A-E side was not "talking to" anything on the F-J side. So, I moved everything over to one side, and it all works well.
I hope my newbie mistake helps someone else. Good luck!