week 9: Output devices

 

 

For this week we had to choose an output device and make a board with it. I chose the DC motor.

 

Board


board

 

 

I redesigned Neil's original design to add a button to control the direction of the movement of the motor.

The first problem I encountered was that when I plugged the board to the Fabisp to program it the 5 volt regulator would get really hot. After one hour of de-soldering and re-soldering components to check what was the problem I decided to take out the Regulator and program the board to see if that way it would work. I programmed the board with Neil's code and no problem. After that I was very afraid of re'solderng again the regulator, but Matt M. said there should be no heating problem while connecting the board to the battery (some problem with the energy coming in the wrong way when the fabisp was connected). So I re-soldered the regulator and connected the battery (and after 2 lost hours) there was no heating, so that was going well. Then the second problem came up. I connected the motor and, instead of turning the motor would shake in a strange way. After that I spent approximately 4 hours, checking things, asking people, sending emails, looking in the internet for a possible explanation, and finally I got the answer from David Cranor, the code was the responsible for this strange movements. I changed the parameters of the delays, de-soldered the jumper in the fabisp, reprogramed the board and it worked. So then I changed the code to include the input of the button, but I did not have any time for anything else.