It's that time of year where everything is due at once, including our semester long project for my electrical engineering lab. our project is to design a robot that can move around the parking lot behind our building using GPS.
Of course our robot still doesn't work. so we've been putting in a lot of time getting it ready
After tonight i've decided that God really does have a sense of humor afterall, which i'm finally starting to share in.
The last day before thanksgiving break: we fry our microcontroller we're using to control the robot due to a bad serial comms chip.
Monday: We finally have our circuit boards etched and we plug everything in...except nothing works. Turns out the plugs for the ribbon cables to connect to the microcontroller are all backwards. The reset button for the microcontroller worked however. Turns out we were dumping ground to the positive voltage
. This is on a brand spanking new microcontroller too, luckily it was ok after that ordeal tho.
Tuesday: we finally get the plugs all reworked (we had to hand twist each pair of wires in 3 16 wire ribbon cables!). So we go to plug everything in and all is well and good except that our LCD isn't working. After spending 4 or 5 hours to see which wire was hooked up wrong we realized it was all right, except that the LCD was blown. Also our two other input buttons are not working under the compiler we're using, but they do work on the other compiler available...except our code doesn't compile under that compiler. So we cut off the buttons entirely.
Wednesday: so by now we're thinking nothing else can go wrong because we've cut out half of the hardware already. wrong. a wire breaks off in the microcontroller header and we can't get it out. After one of my project members brilliantly decides to use a dremel to get it out the header is ruined and we have to put a new header on which is almost impossible!, not to mention the small value capacitors next to it can blow if overheated. But we got it on and it's working.
Today: So after a break from the project to study for the exam i had today i get back to work, this time by myself since my other group members had stuff to do. I go out and put the car on the ground to set some turning angle constants. It sputters forwards, dies, and starts to smoke. Turns out the voltage regulator we are using to convert the 12 volts from the battery to the 7 volts required for the rear motor couldn't handle the extra current needed to push the weight of the car and fried. Luckily we have redundant power for our system and nothing else was affected and i was able to hook up an extra battery we had straight to the rear motor control w/o burning anything out.
So now we just need to disconnect the rear voltage regulators so they don't catch on fire when we power up the system again. although after calling a group member he made the observation of how awesome it would be to watch our car catch fire while driving around
My range of emotions this week has gone from being really pissed off, to really stressed, to indifference masking denial, to acceptance of the fact we won't get our car going, to farcicle humor...i'm just laughing thinking about this now. and our demonstration is this saturday. oh well, at least none of the other groups will have a working car either. and just maybe it will catch fire during the presentation, now
that would be funny
edit: oh yeah...the chip kept resetting itself too...but that just kinda stopped on it's own...so i guess ripping stuff out does work sometimes
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