77_Crashing, Burning, and Learning to Fall with Style

With the final Motor Control and Processing PCB’s being completed so close to the product demonstration date, there has not been much time to test them.  In fact I never got around to actually testing them.  It turns out that a certain connector I used for both boards needed a very small crimper tool for inserting wires into, a size of crimp tool that was not available in the labs.

 

The only choice was to either buy one and wait for it to arrive or start building breadboard circuits from the early prototypes simply to demonstrate basic device functionality for testing purposes.  In Figure 1 is shown the improvised circuits that had to be made in order to replace the Processing and Motor Control PCB’s. 

An Arduino was used to replace the PIC33, since the prototyping PIC we had on a breakout board decided to malfunction last minute.  We could not get the PIC33 to do anything at all, implying that it probably fried somehow.

Motor Control was simplified to only four H-Bridges, doing away with PWM control, current monitoring, and encoder signals.