Project 8 : Output Devices

Motors

The output project for me was an opportunity to get familiar with motors for my final project. I started doing some research on motors and compiled a short text file of notes:

I considered for this week making a circuit that would come in handy for the final project: it simply listens for input on two wires. A signal on the first means "move the motor forward" and a signal on the other means "move the motor backward". I could eventually use this as part of a "network" of boards.

I started from Neil's DC motor design. I thn reduced the programmer to an ATtiny45 (as this project takes very little computation and complexity). For this I had to flip the H-bridge on the board design, and also reuse the MOSI and SCL pins as input:

I then milled and soldered the boards (this is becoming a routine).

For the programming assingment I started off inspiring myself from the scripts I wrote for the previous assignment and also from Neil's code for the DC motor. In the end I wrote a simple script that makes the microcontroller simply relay information received to the H-bridge on the board.

Unfortunately this board relies on the use of a "Motherboard" to communicate with it, so I was not yet able to test the validity of my code or board. Stay tuned for the next weeks!

Files

• Motor board (schematic):DC_motor.sch
• Motor board (board layout):DC_motor.brd
• Traces: DC_motor_traces.png
• Outline: DC_motor_outline.png
• Code: DC_motor.c

Tools used

• Eagle
• Roland Mill
• avr-gcc and avrdude