Week Thirteen

This weeks assignments

    Making an output device.

  • Design a PCB that can function as an output device.
  • Mill the PCB
  • Test it.

    Designing the PCB

    The PCB was based on Niels Hello.stepper.bipolar44 design. I was very intrigued when I found out that we had h-bridges in the library. It's something I've been meaning to play with for some time, so I jumped on the opertunity to mill it out and test it. First I designed the board in Eagle:

    Then I went through the process of defining the paths on the would be PCB - it was interesting to learn how to increase the size of the pcb traces.

    The milling went pretty smooth except for couple of things. I guess I was hurrying a bit and didint realize until embaressingly late that a couple of traces didint get milled out, so I shorted the board. Basically I got no voltage input later when I was troubleshooting my board. The second was that when I was adjusting the milling bit for outlines, instead of using "move to xy0 jog" instead of "move to xyz0" resulting in the milling bit breaking because it wanted to go too far down.

    Everything went smoothly with the milling process from there on out.

    Eagle files of the Motorshield.

    Programming the motorshield

    Initially I just programmed the motorshield with Niels code, just to see it working properly. After that connected it with the temperature sensor from the inputs week so I could run regular DC motors in coordination with temperature and humidity level. For now though, here is just a tester program written in Arduino.

    Motor shield tester program