A breakthrough! (Finally)

So I decided to take things back to basics. As you know I have been having troubles with the circuits that I have been trying to create from a couple of peoples online blogs and instructables pages.

Both of the circuits I am trying to recreate come from another user called J.Skoba, who is actually credited on the Arduino site as coming up with the guide for how to get the MSGEQ7 and Arduino talking together.

Here is a little sketch he made and uploaded of the circuit diagram. So following this guide I have now managed to get numeric values coming into the Arduino from the MSGEQ7, which is taking a feed from a Mono audio jack this time. I decided to ditch the stereo one, because it is tiny and difficult for my fat finger to soldier the jumpers to. Also, it is a much sturdier and professional looking component.

Apart from this, I swapped out all components for fresh ones, including the MSGEQ7. Being honest, I couldn't tell you if it was a component that was the problem or not, but I will explain the differences between the two, cause there are a few main ones.

First off the in the new circuit, the reset pin is going to digital pin 3 of the arduino, rather than digital pin 4 in both of the other projects I have followed so far. This shouldnt matter in theory, as I have checked through the code and the appropriate lines have been changed to make this work. The main difference in the way I have done personally done the circuit this time, is like J.Skoba, I made the Pin 8 oscillator circuit with the resistor and capacitor attached directly to the positive and negative power rails. I have also taken the capacitor straight from Pin 6 to ground rail. I am just trying to avoid as many extra connections as possible to eliminate problem components at this point and it seems to have worked.

So now I have changed the values according to J.Skoba in the other Arduino code that I have contructed from David Wang and Russells blog posts. I have to stress though, neither of their projects work straight out of the box for me.

EDIT: During writing this post i got distracted playing about with the circuit board and managed to get everything working!! I now have a 5M audio reactive LED strip in my room, which is pretty great! My next post shall be dedicated to that circuit, its differences to the others and how I have changed the code to better suit the purposes.