Baby Steps

The last couple of days I got my thumbs out and got to it -

1) The motherboard minus light board. Like Ben Heck says,
'Always build something you can take apart later'. I'm glad I listened, Ben!
The observant can see a piece of electrical tape on one of the shift registers,
which in this case means a dead shift register.

I've removed the motherboard from the machine and tried to fix it.

The removal went easier than expected as I've somehow forgot that I made the board removable as a single piece - despite it being a rather lengthy process of actually removing it.
Once removed, I noticed that two out of five prongs in the USB-connector were broken so at first I simply tried to wiggle the cable in place - which worked. But just as I was going to hot glue the cable in place the remaining prongs broke off as well.

I then figured I'll just replace the USB-port but accidentally broke a circuitboard trace instead. Doh!
But, luckily, after a while on google and the Chipkit-forum, I found out that the one I broke wasn't actually in use for the Chipkit so I'm still good to go. The port is ordered and will hopefully arrive in my mailbox soon. It says "reflow procedure only" but as my friend says - nobody remembers a coward.

Since the work involved removing the board is rather cumbersome I've decided not to reinstall the board until the lightboard is completed, which at the moment it's at 50% complete.

While at it, I took a peek at the broken MOSFET for the left bumper. I couldn't see any immediate problems with it but decided to replace it and the diode on the solenoid itself, should it be the problem.
Hopefully this will keep the left bumper up and running. If not.... then I have no clue what the problem might be. I'll probably use a solid state relay on one of the minor solenoids and use the freed port for the bumper instead.

2) Neat cabling is A to Z. Go the extra mile!
Unless it won't be visible. Then you can cheat. 

I've also attached the spinners,spotlights and switches cables now so all the visible switches and lights are looking good. Still the actual connecting left to do - but having shrink wrapped cables with no visible solder joints does a pretty big difference in appearance!

As for programming, not much has been done since the USB-port is broken, but I've started to look at the profile system I've been planing to do for a while.

Since it's a home game with a rather deep ruleset along with achievements I figure it'll be hard to finish it all in one go - so I'm looking at writing a kind of save game functionality. It will be possible to create and assign profiles for record keeping and competitions etc. 

More about this in a later post!

3) Early shot of the multi color LED circuit. A downer was that
there seem to be a limit in the LED itself so I cannot mix colors
by applying voltage on several pins. I'll probably have to emulate
the yellow color in software to compensate for this.  

Mr Bubbles has gotten a slight update with a tiny circuitboard for the multi-LED in his helmet, along with the servo now properly installed in his belly.

I've unfortunately decided to back down on Mr B's movement pattern and will let his disco moves become subject to a future mod (but the swinging arm and drill is still present).

I'm thinking it's better to get it up and running first instead of not at all, right?

Took a lot less time to write up the summary than to do the actual work, but that's the way it is!

Rinse, repeat...

"-So, what do you do in your spare time?"
"-I'm mostly sitting hunched over my soldering iron and smelling the fumes."
"-Right... I... should be going now."

1) It just keeps bringing more friends along... 

Slowly getting there...
I will genuinely be surprised if even half the ports on this board works when I'm finished with it.

Next time - Pay up, Mr!

Cables...cables everywhere.

Sometimes I really annoy myself, or rather become annoyed by my "I can do this myself"-attitude.
Like the light board for instance - why, oh why, didn't I just order this pre-made on the internet?

1) Satan's lightboard. This is a painful reminder why the invention of circuit boards came to be.

What you see on the picture is a gazillion solder points and A QUARTER of the cables needed to complete it. After that, some serious testing and hopefully at least some of them function... Right now I don't remember if I have any light slots to spare, so hopefully they'll all work. I hope.

I thought about both remaking it using a matrix instead or simply design it in CAD and have it manufactured instead. Both things cost money thou, but at the moment I don't really care...
No matter how hard I try, all I see when I look at the board is this...

Source: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2008/03/ 

Shameless promotion

Thought I'd just drop a few lines about my other passion in life - my band.

We're called Chugger.
What we play could be called locomotive metal due to its unstoppable, undeniable and raw nature.
Check us out at our official homepage or on facebook!

Here's our latest video for our demo version of "Bleed".
Viewer discretion is advised. 

Preliminary sketches

So this is the current state of the CNC-machine:

1) Front view. I won't go into a lot of details yet, but it will be chain driven X/Y-wise and a lead screw for the Z-axis.
I hope to reduce the carriage width by around 5-10 cm in the final version.

2) Side view. Hopefully I've gotten most of the weight centered to avoid wobbling. The expected cut length is around 117.5 cm, which is slightly larger than a regular pinball playfield. Larger pieces can be cut with a little manual repositioning of the carriage and resetting of the zero-position in software, but I do believe this should be sufficient to start with. 

Not too impressive, but I'd rather have it as good as possible before actually making it.
Note that the rails for this design is based on 30mm width/height, but hopefully I'll find L-profiles of a smaller size so the overall design will be slimmer and the cut area slightly larger.

Thoughts?

It moves like Jagger!

Got the motors running just now!

I had quite a struggle getting them to run due to a) pretty crappy chinese documentation and b) I missed the fact that each motor had it's own enable line that must be held high during operation.
But they seem to be working fine and are actually a lot less noisy than I expected them to be.
Hopefully they'll have enough juice to drive my rig...

1) Driverboard, power supply and X,Y,Z-stepper motors. In case you're wondering why there are unplugged cables everywhere - the motors are bi-polar 6-cable versions and only 4 are required. They will be cut appropriately during assembling... 

Now I'll just need to get my hands on the rest of the parts and start building!

Virtual movement!

Received most of my parts for the CNC machine now - all that's missing is a few bearings, an aluminum rod and the wood for the frame itself.

I was originally planing on connecting the CNC-router driver to my Mac, but as it turns out CNC-driver boards are only using the parallel port. This is due to the unreliability of the USB protocol/port and the fact that there's a very low number of I/O pins compared to LPT-ports.

Luckily, my father had an old laptop that I could use instead. Really ancient hardware, but since the Mach3 software is designed for very low end computers it works just fine!

Behold!

1) CNC-software Mach3. Currently "dry-running" the example "roadrunner.tap" file.

The vast amount of configurable things in this software is staggering. Hopefully I won't have to trim each one of them since I'm going for sub-millimeter accuracy - not sub-nanometer...

Now I'll just need to get the power supply and motors connected!