Friday, October 15, 2010

Testub es hardware and software

Massive annoyance this week - I managed to burn out my second ATMEGA328 and third Darlington DIP. I know why - at the moment I am in the prototyping phase, so all my components are in breadboard format. Normally this is never a problem, however for me I am having huge problems because my device has such a big range of motion it is hard to avoid shorts when you have 7 crocodile clips dragging all over the place.

It seems that I am managing to get a reverse voltage of 12V back through the darlington, which fries it, shorting microcontroller supply rail, going back into the arduino. Now I know what a smoking microcontroller looks like.

With no interfacing hardware to work with I focused primarily on getting the processing sketch optimised so that I can have accurate position feedback on the GUI so I can work out the accuracies of the arduino. I also set up a basic dummy page on my server so I was able to establish a connection between it and the processing sketch. I have a system of logging the waypoints of the locations of the test tubes so that the data stream coming in from the server know exactly where to send the platform to.

I also bought an air-valve from Jaycar and took the gamble that it could also switch water on and off. Turns out it does it beautifully. I built a system onto the platform so the valve could switch a line in of water so that a drip would fall into a test tube under the platform.

Tags: arduino microcontroller electronics

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