electronics team

We devided into (essentially) two teams: the mechanical team and the electronics team! Surprisingly, only a handful of members of the EECS shop wanted to be on the electronics team...

The electronics team first met on Saturday - we were given a hoard of information with very loosely defined guidelines on how to put all of the pieces together. Together, we learned that there were three types of controller boards: four stepper motor boards, two breadboard boards (which could be used to control the spindle motor), and a routing board to which the computer communicated. We started assembling the boards in the conference room and trying to talk to them.

We ran into a few hiccups on the first day: one of our motor boards seemed to be fried. We spent a decent bit of time trying to debug the issue and eventually concluded that we had fried a board, perhaps from a short.

The next day, we convened again to pick up new boards from Jake. Today, we discovered a lot more problems with our boards: one got extremely hot when connected to power, another would not light up when connected to power, and another was fried from the day before. We ended up getting four new boards (and a ton of guidance) from Jake, which all worked properly!

We made huge strides getting boards finally programmed and talking to each other. I spent a lot of the day getting the four new stepper boards assembled, soldered, and programmed as well as assembling our personal power supply. Another team was working on the spindle motor board, and another on talking to the router board.

More of our collective struggles (including the mechanical side) can be seen here!