Problems with our Multiplexer / Wiring
So Allister has a Multiplexer that we decided to push forward with. We wired the entire breadboard the prior night hoping to tackle the code the following day.
The Following Day:
We did find some code from the Arduino website to start with, but we weren't even sure if the Multiplexer worked. We we started working with the Serial to see what kind of outputs we were getting. This led to hours of watching different varations of 0's and 1's run through the Serial for various reasons. Unfortunately none of the reasons made much sense to us. We were convinced the problem was within our code so that is where we spent most of our troubleshooting.
It wasn't until Ben Chao looked at our code, rewrote some of it and then troubleshooted our breadboard that we realized some of our mistakes. As you see below, we forgot to run power to all our switches on the left side. But our big problem was the face we weren't grounding our switches before running them into our Multiplexer. This caused an incomplete circuit making it impossible for the Arduino to read anything.
It was really helpful to have someone with a programming background help us out because instead of thinking the code was the problem, he helped us realized it was actually the wiring.
Now using the Multiplexer's datasheet we filled in the array from the orginal code and we are now able to see each switch through Serial. Yipee!!!
Here is our code at this point. [Code]