(no subject)
It looks like I managed to fix the Make Controller I've been using on the 'bot.
I was experimenting with the arm on the 'bot around the holidays and managed to blow out something on the servo controller. There was magic smoke and a nice scorch mark on the board and a spot of shiny copper where green circuit covering used to be. I soldered over the obvious blown trace and that didn't fix it. I put it all up on the shelf at that point because that meant it was almost certainly a damaged/dead SMD component like a MOSFET or something.
Between my SMD skills not being all that hot and getting ready to get married and then go off to Trieste a month later, I just didn't have any more time to work on it.
There's also the issue of a replacement being $110, which is just on the other side of me buying another one as a way out of the problem. Esp since the CPU and the other I/O ports are perfectly fine.
So I got the board off the shelf last night with the idea that I would make one last attempt at trying to fix it. If I couldn't I'd take it to HBRC and see if an appeal to bigger brains than mine could help fix it or, failing that drop it off in the Free Box and move on with a replacement or to something like the Beagle Board.
I *did* find another bad trace off in a corner on the top of the board, near the VEXT connector that I missed on my first inspection(I had been looking mostly at the bottom). I bridged that with a bit of solder too and plugged in two servos and powered up the board. I plugged the board's USB connector into my laptop and sent it a couple servo commands and they *WORKED*!!
w00t!
So I appear to have fixed it to a first approximation. I'm going to hook the servos that make up the arm to it and see how it does under load.
I was experimenting with the arm on the 'bot around the holidays and managed to blow out something on the servo controller. There was magic smoke and a nice scorch mark on the board and a spot of shiny copper where green circuit covering used to be. I soldered over the obvious blown trace and that didn't fix it. I put it all up on the shelf at that point because that meant it was almost certainly a damaged/dead SMD component like a MOSFET or something.
Between my SMD skills not being all that hot and getting ready to get married and then go off to Trieste a month later, I just didn't have any more time to work on it.
There's also the issue of a replacement being $110, which is just on the other side of me buying another one as a way out of the problem. Esp since the CPU and the other I/O ports are perfectly fine.
So I got the board off the shelf last night with the idea that I would make one last attempt at trying to fix it. If I couldn't I'd take it to HBRC and see if an appeal to bigger brains than mine could help fix it or, failing that drop it off in the Free Box and move on with a replacement or to something like the Beagle Board.
I *did* find another bad trace off in a corner on the top of the board, near the VEXT connector that I missed on my first inspection(I had been looking mostly at the bottom). I bridged that with a bit of solder too and plugged in two servos and powered up the board. I plugged the board's USB connector into my laptop and sent it a couple servo commands and they *WORKED*!!
w00t!
So I appear to have fixed it to a first approximation. I'm going to hook the servos that make up the arm to it and see how it does under load.