User blog:Brandonlock1213/11/17/10

My objective for the day was to interface the MCU with motors.

Because the pins on the controller were giving me an unreliable connection, I attempted to solder the header pins to the board. I stopped at three pins because the soldering iron wasn't hot enough to make the solder connect to the board. The board is now stuck to the pins because of obstructing lumps of solder. I gave up and just touched wires to pins for the rest of my testing.

I originally planned to use the same prototyping board as I did with the capacitor array, but the "in-place connections" on the board are problematic.There's no way to place the controller board on the prototyping board without randomly connecting some pins together. Because a breadboard would be too heavy to put on the blimp, we're going to need to purchase a standard prototyping board from radioshack that doesn't have any pre-determined connections.

I did a quick test to confirm that the motor pins on the controller were functional. They worked as expected. The MCU not has a simple program that tells motor 1 to move at full speed. I also did a quick test with the motor driver IC we purchased for the third motor. Acting as the MCU, I tested the different pins on the motor driver. Everything worked as expected.

We're going to need to write our own PWM code for our MCU's. This requires usage of the hardware timers on the MCU to generate consistent pulses. It's very important we choose a different timer than what the other motors are using or they'll conflict obviously.

I found some example code here:

http://www.ermicro.com/blog/?p=224

Conclusion: I need a standard prototyping board and a better soldering iron to move forward.