Concept & Thinking Ahead About Systems Integration
The intention of this week was to build off of Input week and complete the stepper motor functionality.
As an additional note, I had begun thinking about systems integration the previous week, and all my boards from now on would be designed with M3 holes for mounting to chassis.
In this case, the plan was to 3D print the turntable chassis with the board, stepper motor, and buttons attached to it using M3 nuts and bolts, heat-set threaded inserts, and custom-shaped holders for the buttons.
I realized at this point that I did not have a way to power the board without a USB-A female connector, and so I intended to run a USB power cable and extension to power the turntable.
Future boards I design would later incorporate mini USB headers for power.
Stepper Motor Sorrows
Unfortunately, this week ended up being a bit of a wash.
I ran into multiple issues with controlling the stepper motor, no matter what I did, with the board resetting itself repeatedly.
It turns out that there was an undocumented issue in the first iterations of the Zach's DRV8436 breakout board that needed troubleshooting.
This wasn't discovered and addressed by him until the final project demo day, unfortunately, and attempts to debug this on my own and with various TA's helps were unsuccessful.
