User blog:Brandonlock1213/Spring 2011- Meeting 8 Summary

Autonomous Blimp
Tom confirmed operation of our motor driver in anticipation of soldering it the final PCB (with the Baby Orangutan). It works fine, but apparently one of our three motors with propellors has stopped functioning. I removed the motor's propellor and examined its fit on our alternative propellors. We have two viable options:(1) use a heavier motor with same shaft size or (2) use one of our narrow, long motors and fill the gap in shaft size with super-glue at the risk of having a lop-sided propellor but lighter motor.

The motor driver has been soldered to the final PCB with about half of its connection wires finished.

As follows is Tom's truth table for the motor driver:

12 LED Prototype
Mike finished our 12 LED prototype of the NerdKits LED Matrix. Although we copied their schematics, we are having some trouble with turning on LED's properly. With the row and column control wires hooked up to data switches on a starter board, we are unable to turn on individual LED's without lighting up an entire row or column at the same time.

For reference, NerdKits' instructions are as follows: "To turn on the top left LED in this schematic, we would make row 0 be LOW, column 0 be HIGH, and simply drive no current onto the other row and column wires. For its neighbor one spot to the right, we would make row 0 be HIGH, column 0 be LOW, and not drive the others. The same pattern applies for all of the 5 row and 12 column wires, so that ultimately we can individually control every LED in the array."

Peggy Prototype
In anticipation of our Peggy Prototype, Justin successfully test programmed a discrete ATMega644P. Initially, we had some trouble programming the controller because the pins on our programmer are poorly labeled. Here is a labeled image of the pins for future reference. We feel ready to purchase components from digi-key for our own board now.