User blog:Brandonlock1213/Spring 2011- Meeting 8 + 9 Summary

Autonomous Blimp
Everything but the motors are soldered on and ready for testing. We should be able to hash this out in another day or so of testing.

Electronics/Software

 * Finished the IR receiver + Ultrasonic sensor program
 * The IR receiver range is fairly limited -- keep within 5-10 feet to be safe
 * New 9v batteries purchased for beacon

Motor Control
Turns out we forgot to solder three connections on the motor driver. The multimeter was especially helpful in figuring this out. Also, the fat DC motor we have in the electronics room doesn't work under 5 volts. We need to test motor control using the actual motors with propellors.

I resoldered one of the motor control wires from PB4 to PD0 because PB4 is used during programming and may cause weird behavior with the motors when attached. See the Baby Orangutan module pinout display.

Both Vcc1 and Vcc2 on the motor driver also had to be resoldered to Vin (7.4v) on the Baby Orangutan board because the Baby Orangutan can only supply 100mA max before bad things happen. The IR receivers each take about 5mA and the Ultrasonic sensor only takes 3mA, so we don't have to worry too much about over driving the controller as long as we're not directly powering motors.

Code for a simple motor test is listed below. The important thing is which pins are connected:

while(1){ set_digital_output(IO_B2, HIGH); set_digital_output(IO_D0, LOW); delay_ms(2000); set_digital_output(IO_B2, LOW); set_digital_output(IO_D0, LOW); delay_ms(2000); set_digital_output(IO_B2, LOW); set_digital_output(IO_D0, HIGH); delay_ms(2000); }