Output Devices

For this weeks assigment, we were told to add an output device to a microcontroller board, and then program it to do something

From the provided examples, I decided to use the unipolar stepper motor. I loaded up the traces and interior boards into the Fab Modules and milled out the board on the Modela. I've gotten pretty familiar with this workflow, so it was a fairly easy process.

After soldering (and scrounging around the lab to find the parts) everything on (using the board layout provided), I hooked it up to the FabISP and a 9 volt battery to program the board. There wasn't enough space on the board to hook up the stepper motor and the FabISP at the same time, so I was going to program it, unhook it, test it and if it wasn't working, hooking it up again and starting over.

I started out with the Wave makefile, and again used the FTDI programming example from Embedded Programming to program the board. There's no external crystal on this board, so I didn't have to make the fuses.

To connect the stepper motor to the board, I had to change the way it connected slightly. It came with a 6 pinned connector which are in one row, but the connector on the board is 6 pins in two rows.
I cut off the original connector and then lined up the correctly coloured wires to the right pins using the provided board layout.
I then plugged in the stepper, and it immediatly started to move. Excellent!

I ended up trying all three bits of provided code (wave, half and full), but I didn't really notice much of a difference in the way the stepper reacted. I haven't taken the time to try and modify some of the code in the C file.