next topic »

[on:]

New to Arduino, first time posting.
I'm having a blast tinkering with electronics, but I'm running into a problem. I'm doing the DigitalReadSerial tutorial-

http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/DigitalReadSerial

And the LED at 13 stays lit, but gets brighter when I press the switch I have. I've even tried moving the Arduino thinking that the fabric of the surface I'm working on was giving it interference, but same thing. Is this what I should be expecting? Or might something be wrong with my Arduino?

I've moved the circuit around on my breadboard too, just to rule that out.

[Reply #1 on:]

You haven't wired your button correctly with the pull down resistor.  The input pin is floating.

Videos of what are happening:
http://www.cmiyc.com/tutorials/arduino-pull-ups/

[Reply #2 on:]

Thanks for the quick reply. I kept tinkering with the breadboard, tore everything out and then re-wired from the beginning and the pin stopped floating. I think that's kind of cool that it does that, and I imagine that's also where my random number generator is getting it's info from too, which I think is awesome... Just not when I don't want it to.

Might this mean I didn't have the resistor seated right? I was concerned that maybe my button was jacked up... It was one of the first things I'd ever soldered. It has leads that are too thick to go into the breadboard, so I just soldered on some jumper wires.

[Reply #3 on:]

Disconnected resistor is the most likely reason.

[Reply #4 on:]

You live, you learn, right?

Again, thanks for your help.