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01 Oct 15: This page is currently, being actively worked on. Come back in an hour! Rest of site pretty well "done"... for now.
Feel free to plug it in! JUST to a source of 5v, via the USB cable I hope you bought with it, or already had. DON'T attempt to feed it power any other way, until you have read other pages at this site.
It may do nothing! Don't be alarmed... unless you have already put the little switch near the USB connector to the "on" position. (Labeled, thank you Quin. Pushed towards the USB connector.)
The Qduinos sent out to Kickstarter backers came with a "test program" already programmed into them. That doesn't mean the same program will be in new Qduinos for all time. The page you are reading is entirely unofficial. If your Qduino isn't doing the following, check the web before panicking. If you learn that a new program is installed in newer Qduinos, please let me know, so I can revise this?
The two tri-state LEDs, "User" and "Stat", should, broadly speaking, wink on: red/ blue/ green... over and over, stopping on each color for about one second.
If you have plugged the Qduino into the USB port of another computer, with the Qduino's power switch set to "on", you may get a brief (no more than two seconds) spell of "funny" flashes. Including, perhaps, a brief moment of red on one tri-color LED, blue on the other. The red and blue elements of the Stat tri-color module have connections to the Qduino's USB circuits, and sometimes those connections will make those LED elements "do things".... but I've only seen it when programming the Qduino, when using the serial monitor, and, briefly when a Qduino is plugged into a USB port on an "awake" computer.
Within a few seconds of power becoming available, the new Qduino's LEDs should start behaving as follows...
Both will wink red. Both will wink blue. And sometimes both will wink green. The "User" (lower) LED will always wink green during the "green" turn in the cycle.
The green element of the upper LED unit ("Stat") should always behave as follows:
If a lipo cell not present, the green LED in "Stat" will be off, or flickering, or on dimly.
If a lipo cell is present, the green LED in "Stat" will be on... if the lipo cell is charging. If there is no source of power to charge the cell, the green LED in "Stat" will be off. If the cell is fully charged, the LED will be off.
The behavior just described will "overlay" the other things going on in an "as delivered" Qduino.
As I said, the two tri-color LEDs will, in general go red/red, blue/blue, green/(green or off or dim or flickering). (I've indicated what the User LED will look like first, in each of the above pairs.)
If the Qduino has a lipo and it is charging, the apparent color on the "Stat" LED will be yellowish... the result of the red and green elements both being on. And the "blue" will be tend toward cyan. During the green part of the cycle, the green parts of both User and Stat will be glowing brightly.
If the Qduino has a lipo and it is fully charged, but has USB power as well as lipo power, you will see a very "clean" red/red, blue/blue. green/off.
If the Qduino is not connected to a lipo don't be alarmed if you notice the green element of the "Stat" tri-color LED looking as if something is wrong. It isn't. It is just "telling" you that there's no lipo present.
By the way, said elsewhere, too, but while we're on the subject of LEDs....
There's a tiny green LED on the board just to the right of the two big tri-color LED modules. It is on when the board has power, from whatever source, and off if it doesn't. It is "downstream" of the "on/ off" switch, so will be off if the switch is off, even if a lipo is plugged in, or if there's a connection to power by other means, e.g. the USB connector.
The Qduino, probably because it is designed particularly with battery powered operations in mind, does not have the "traditional" LED on D13.
This page is written primarily to help you know if your just- received Qduino is "okay".
The sequence of lights described above will only arise if you haven't yet put any different software into the Qduino. I know of no way to "re-set" it, to put it back to the "as received" state.
For how you access any of the LEDs, see other pages at this site, in particular the page on using the Qduino's LEDs, as you may have guessed, if you knew about the page!
I hope you found this sub page of my pages about the Qduino useful? Please tell others about it, if so! Forums, Facebook, etc?
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