The X27 dial gauge motors came in this week, a whole box of them (as I tend to break stuff ;) )!

Steering the motors
Thanks to the SwitecX25 library by [guyc] setting up the X27 was pretty easy. Seems I only need 4 pins to power this little motor, so I think we can do away with the Qwiic motor driver and power it from the Artemis directly! I'll dry run most on the Arduino Uno for now though.

Using the demo code, when I select a number from 0 to 944 (give or take) in the terminal prompt, the dial spins round. But I've yet to figure out some code to scale it to the arc I want the dial to move into. It also seems to be quite erratic, as it not always seems to jump to a (for me) logical place on the dial.
The dial will have to respond to "teh Geigurz" I will be faking by some other means, so accuracy is not that important but it would be nice for it to actually gauge something semi-correctly. However, as a proof of concept, I have managed to get the dial to spin, so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.
I used part of a Gundam model kit's sprue/runner as a dial gauge. I'll try and whittle it down to a finer point going forward.

Fitting the dial motor

I was afraid the motor would have been too big to fit inside of the Rad Module, but give or take some plastic struts that may or may not be removed, the dial motor fits pretty well, as you can see in the pictures below:

As you can see, I think it will fit pretty well if I remove (part of) the screw struts.

Might even put some neodymium magnets in the top of the holes so I can just use magnets to affix the side plates. I'll have to solder and reinforce the motor pins to some cables, but those can be routed to the Artemis Nano directly, so skipping on the motor driver board will save me some space in there.

The next step is going to be finding a way to produce some real Geiger counter noises when the dial is moving, and I think I've got just the thing for that! See you in the next Project Log!