Fab Academy 2017 at Fab Lab Barcelona By Trinidad Gomez Machuca
Add an output device to a microcontroller board you’ve designed and program it to do something
For this assignment I decided to make the stepper motor microcontroller because I would like to apply it in my machine design assignment, my team want to design a solar tracker and for that we need to control two stepper motors. So I followed Niel's board Niel's board for programming a stepper motor
Depending on the components, I followed the same process for designing my microcontroller, I made a schematic and then the board, exported the .eps file to made the traces and outlines .png, respecting the scale in order to process the files in the fab modules.
I followed the same process for fab modules respecting the information for every setting.
Follow the components from the niel's boards in the page
COMPONENTS
A 4953
3 Capacitors 1uf
2 Capacitors 10uf
Resistor 10 k
2 Four Pin Header
1 Six Pin Header
Bridge 5V
Solder all the components and when you finished you have to check with the voltmeter every trace, all the path of VCC, ground, Mossi, etc. Another important thing is to solder very carefully every component and before milling, check twice your Eagle file; I made 4 times this board because I always had some of the above mentioned problems. Make this microcontrolers is very easy, if you do it very carefully.
After checked that all the components of your board are ok with the voltmeter, connect it to the AVR programmer, then connect the energy (in my case the stepper motor works only with 12V,) and finally connect to the motor. Note: If you only connect the programmer the light will be red because needs the 12V to work, when you connected the two at the same time, it should be green.
1. Here goes the energy, be careful, make sure wich one is VCC and Ground, otherwise you can burn the Attiny44. Follow your schematic.
2. Here goes the AVR programmer. Make sure which one is GND.
3. Here goes the stepper motor.
Download the make file, just be sure that the file is for the Attiny44; after this, open your terminal and make the program. If you have something like the image, it means that your board has been programed.
Honestly I'm not sure about the code in C, in general i understand that the motor will be prepared in the ports for receiving instructions for the direction of the output and then set 20 steps per every 100 cycles.
Like i said before I'm not sure about the code in C, that's why I used a basic example of how to control the stepper motor with the Arduino, it is very important to follow also the diagram of the conecction, the mayority of time this diagram are made in fritzing, and also read the datasheet of the pins of the driver, but more less with this example you can understand and control the stepper motors, they ar easier than i thought.
After fixing all my soldering, traces, components and milling problems, mi microcontroller finally worked for the stepper motor. I connected it to a two different stepper motors, one in the solar tracker machine that I made for the assignment of Machine Design, and the other that I thought didn't work. For this assignment I did it in the week of output device but it didn't work, and I did it again after the machine design, while I was doing the solar tracker, I learnt a lot about stepper motors, in a manually way on Arduino. First I tried to do it with a CNC shield but it was too limitated for what I wanted to do, then I used drivers, it was difficult but easier than the CNC shield. What I learnt in the output device, is that making your own board is easier than use Arduino Hardware because is more simple. I used to believe that the stepper motors was one of the most difficult exercises for this week but it is not, the only thing you need is to understand the architecture of the Attiny 44, connect to the digital pins of the two drivers and program it.
//Arduino
//Eagle
Output Devices Assignments and Assessment
Information about the Output devices
Stepper motorBoard
Stepper motorComponents
Fab Academy 2017 | Fab Lab Barcelona | Trinidad A. Gomez Machuca |
IAAC | trinidad.gomez@iaac.net | |