The work continues….
I really had some trouble getting the motors to run properly. Every time is made a new transistor switch the power drop was so immense that everything else failed or the controller rebooted. Even an attempt in using a MOSFET H-Bridge failed. So in the end I decided to just buy motor drivers.
So I’ve ended up with two TB6612 motor drivers. They are cheap and small. So they looked ok from the first glance.
However after wiring everything as you can see in the gallery below I didn’t got the response I wanted. Only three of the four outputs provided me with working motors. However the last one just didn’t respond. I spend an entire night measuring the connections and trying to debug. And I could find nothing wrong. But then somewhere hidden in the specs.. Two of the pins I used to control the second driver are input only.. So rewired them and yes…. I got them working.
So at the moment I can drive it.. and produce smoke… So we are getting somewhere.
Meanwhile I had also made a new prototype. I call it prototype but currently I’m not sure if I rebuild everything once I reach the point of ” this should work” or if I just try to make this one better looking. But that is something to bend my mind over at a later point in time.
The new prototype has the battery connected a controller board and I even got time to install the first servo for the turret. I orignally wanted to use steppers as they were way smaller. But the amount of control pins required for that really limited the rest of all I have in store.. So for now I’m testing how it works with servo’s instead.
I also worked on the wheels. As I used lego for the tracks it was handy to also use wheels and gears. Make life easy and it will last. At least that is my experience with lego.
I added some foam to the front wheels to make them slightly bigger and ensure they have more grip on the track itself. Maybe I’ll use the same foam to update the tracks to a bit more orky kinda style. It’s easy to work with and holds paint very good. But that is something for the final stages.
For testing I build a very simple controller app using Blynk. It gives me a joystick for control and several buttons for activating the serveral other functions like lights,turret control and the smoke.
I hope that I have the time the upcoming days to work on the code for controlling it all. For now I focussing on a demo program showing all the functions one after another.
So slowly it is starting to take shape.. Can’t wait for the next test drive ?
13.
<Gallery will be added tonight>