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Hardware finished on to integration testing
07/02/2014 at 02:16 • 0 commentsSo I think all of the hardware have been assembled. I jumpered Vcc to 24V to power all of the drivers and don't connect Vcc to the arduino any more because 5V is not needed. I also could not find any small 1206 caps so I soldered some through hole parts to the board. I have the code just cycling through the commutation table(with 100 millisec delay) as kind of an open loop control with the usb reporting what state I am in.
I was going to testing it out but my power supply has no current control(24V at 20A) and I wanted to do it in a more controlled environment so I might give it a shot tomorrow at work with one of the variable power supply so that I won't toast all of the hard work that I have done in one shot.
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Vcc Checked
06/26/2014 at 12:36 • 0 commentsSo I powered the board with 12V and then toggled the HI and LO inputs on all of the drivers. The LO output worked great and was putting out 12V as I thought. But the HI output was doing some weird floating back to gnd behavior. I went back again and looked at the interals of the IR2101 and the HI driver voltage shouldn't be measure in relation to GND it should be measured in relation to the bottom of the HI FET which is the top of the half H bridges. I have not verified this yet but I am confident that the chips are working correctly now.
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Check Vcc
06/24/2014 at 14:45 • 0 commentsSo I ran into multiple issue soldering up the perf board and decided to go with the PCB. It took a couple of times to get the board this clean. Currently the HI/LO drivers are powered by 5V from the arduino. After testing with 5V power the driver and toggle each input none of the outputs worked correctly. I ohmed out all the connections and everything looks good so I figured I should read over the driver datasheet again. And much to my happiness and chagrin, Vcc need to be greater than 10V. So this shouldn't be a horrible mistake and I think I can use the 24V that is going to the FETs to power the chips. I will update again after I am able to run addition tests.
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June Status
06/16/2014 at 18:34 • 0 commentsDespite not having the perf-board proof of concept working, I ordered some PCBs from dirtypcbs because they were cheap and I wanted to have tasks moving in parallel. Currently I am debugging the arduino code and the PoC. If I run into any serious problems, I might just move over to working with the pcb shields to develop the arduino library.