11. Output devices¶
This week I worked on creating the board I would use for my final project.
Group Work¶
Individual Work¶
The first thing I had to do was understand how a motor would work and what would be needed to be able to code my output device. Thanks to this helpful guide I was able to understand that I needed a motor driver in order to properly code my device. Luckily we had some on hand in addition to the Arduino Uno’s or in this case a substitute to an Arduino Uno. I started by setting up my Motor driver in accordance to the example above.
With that I opened up my Arduino App and started to program my board. I started utilising an example code on how to make a motor spin periodically:
I uploaded the code to my board and with a piece of tape to track the spin it worked in an unexpected manner not spinning consistantly but all I needed at this point was to get the motor to spin.
#include <Stepper.h>
const int buttonPin = 8; // the number of the pushbutton pin
const int stepsPerRevolution = 1000; // change this to fit the number of steps per revolution
// for your motor
// variables will change:
int buttonState = 0; // variable for reading the pushbutton status
// initialize the stepper library on pins 8 through 11:
Stepper myStepper(stepsPerRevolution, 1, 2, 3, 4);
void setup() {
// set the speed at 60 rpm:
myStepper.setSpeed(60);
// initialize the serial port:
Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
// read the state of the pushbutton value:
buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
// check if the pushbutton is pressed. If it is, the buttonState is HIGH:
if (buttonState == HIGH) {
// step one revolution in one direction:
myStepper.setSpeed(60);
Serial.println("clockwise");
myStepper.step(stepsPerRevolution);
delay(1); }else {
myStepper.setSpeed(1);
delay(0);
}
}
The intial test of the bread board were incredibly successful aside from my button not always wanting to stay in place with continuous pressing.
The next step was to open up KiCad to create my board. The board itself was rather simple only requiring a button, capacitor, resitor, and the ports to program my board, attach my motor driver, and power source. I also used this pin example format to help distrubute my pin headers to the pins of my at-tiny board and my code.
The milling of this board was a bit arduous the mill didn’t want to properly cut my board but after a few attempts I got my board. Soldering my board was pretty simple there weren’t a lot of moving parts.
The inital upload of my code stressed me out because it refused to work but after a bit of playing around with the outputs I realized I selected the wrong at-tiny board settings and it uploaded perfectly.
