Picaxe28x1 kit and those ribbons

Community General Discussions
1

*warning* Extreme newbie questions below..

I have the 28x1 starter pack and it includes 3 ribbons but I'm not sure of the correct/best way to use them..

Is the red stripe at the top of the ribbon supposed to indicate something?

I connected one ribbon to the ouputs on the right side of the board (when the serial/usb jack is at the top) with the ribbon going to the right and the red stripe at the top and I stripped some wires (for pin 4 I think) from the other end to plug into a breadboard where I have a couple of led's setup. I loaded the sample code from the picaxe manual and the LED's do flash so all seems well but some things are not too clear to me..

Is the ribbon connected the right way around with that red stripe at the top or doesn't it matter?

Is there some way to know which pin/row is connected to which wire in the ribbon besides trial and error?

The top 2 pins appear to be Ground.. how should I use those? If something is connected to any of the V pins can I connect the ground to one of those 2 Ground wires in the ribbon or only the ground connector on the same row as the V pin can be used?

I tried connecting one of those ground wires in the ribbon to the breadboard in place of one of the wires from pin4 and depending which pin4 wire I replaced the LED's either did nothing or they lit up and stayed on instead of flashing..

So this is where it gets confusing - the LED when it flashes is as far as I know connected to V and the Output pin (no ground?!) and when it's not flashing but it is lit then presumably it is connected to a V pin and the Ground - is this correct? So does this mean that anything connected only to a V pin and Ground is always ON? There's no way to control V in the code, to make the LED flash for example?

Now if I want to connect a servo - since the ribbon is already connected to all the pins then presumably there is a way to connect the servo via the ribbon? Since the ribbon has 3 wires can I just connect 2 wires from one row of V & Ouput pins and then connect the ground wire in the servo to one of those 2 ground wires from the ribbon or will something start smoking? Also how would I connect more than 2 servos when there are just 2 Ground wires in the ribbon?

 

Thats all the questions for now - hope they're not too stupid! ;)

 

2

There’s a great walk through

There’s a great walk through of the Picaxe 28 project board here.

3

read the docs
the 28x board comes with some pretty good documentation that explains how to hook up the ribbon. The red wire is there so you have a reference. If you’re using it as designed, the red wire and the wire next to it are Ground.

4

Any hint as to which doc

Any hint as to which doc that info is in? There are hundreds of pdf files on the included cd and so far I’ve found none that describe how to connect the ribbons… nothing in the the three picaxe_manual files for example.

 

edit - found it! In AXE020.pdf