Pushbutton Not Working?

[WillMattWood]

I have a feeling I may know part of the reason why my circuit is not working... but I figured I would ask. Basically I am trying to figure out if I am doing something wrong, or if I may have a batch of dead/non functioning Pushbutton components. I hope this post contains enough info to shed some light...

So far, I am following through the "Serial & Input" tutorial here and have made it as far as testing the Pushbutton with a 10K resistor in series. The tutorial instructs one to use a multimeter, and connect the Red Lead to a pin on the Pushbutton, and the Black Lead to ground.

I am putting the Black Lead literally almost into the hole where the wire goes to ground in the breadboard. (But I am definitely making connection to the metal.)

At this point...

• If I put the Red Lead to one of the wires on the 10K resistor, I am able to measure 5 Volts from the multimeter.
• However when I press the Pushbutton, the voltage does not change... I still see 5V.
• I also cannot get 5 Volts by touching the Red Lead to any of the pins on the PushButton itself (as described in the tutorial).

Now I feel like it's important to note... I am building this circuit in parallel to my existing circuit that I completed from the RGB Tutorial . I completed that tutorial successfully, and that circuit is still functioning just fine through this whole process. I feel like I must be doing something wrong as I tested two different Pushbuttons and they both behaved in the same way. Would having the two circuits in parallel maybe mess with the proper functioning of the 2nd "Pushbutton" circuit? Or perhaps I got a bad batch of Pushbuttons?



Also maybe I am doing something else completely wrong. When I get home tonight I can try to post pictures of the circuit and where I am tapping with the multimeter if need be.

 

[GremlinWrangler]

You possibly need to post a photo og the button setup but from the description you are never getting the switch contacts closed/short. A suggested step is to remove the button and replace it with a wire jumper and measure the voltages with and without the jumper in place. If that gets the result you expect next step is to find out if the problem is the button itself or it's contact with the bread board.

 

[WillMattWood]

So I think my problem is resolved for now.

One key piece of information that I was missing was that the orientation of the Pushbutton matters!! I did not realize that a 90 degree rotation of the 4-pin Pushbutton would make a difference in how the circuit is bridged. In retrospect this is obvious... but yeah I just didn't have that info in my brain. . I also just removed everything and started again with only the Pushbutton circuit in place, and with this basic circuit I was able to get the correct functionality. Rebuilt the LED circuit and everything seems to be moving smoothly now!