Week before finals here and I should be studying and stuff but yeah....
Last week we used the newly purchased PCB machine (sketchily made in eastern Europe) in the basement of Barrows Hall (where all the sketchy EET majors live). The machine is a PCB mill that actually takes a copper clad board and these little tiny milling heads and literally mills every trace out of the board to make a PCB. I was very leery about using this machine for multiple reasons, largely because there is no solder mask which essentially mean all the traces are uninsulated. So if you put a screwdriver or anything metal on the top or bottom of the board it will likely ruin your day. Also, these types of boards tend to lend themselves to being very fragile... traces tend to lift up, pads fall off, etc. Lastly, being a new machine the most knowledgable people about the machine's operation happen to be another senior project group that has made like 5 PCBs in an effort to create one working one. Lucky for us, they offered to give us a hand and our board came out of the machine the right way the first time.
Unfortunately for us, we've had a lot of issues populating the board despite the fact that I got all but one non-essential component footprint correct. Weird connection issues with the through hole components, and a lack of solder mask doesn't help. We've ripped up a couple of traces accidentally, and generally made a mess of the board. Today we finally got the entire board populated and apparently working until we blew yet another gate driver and threw in the towel for the day. Here is a picture of the unpopulated PCB.....
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| Top Layer of the PCB |
I'll throw up a picture of the populated board once it's working. We've got to screw it all down and stuff for this coming Tuesday when we have our hardware show where the profs come in, abuse our project and grill us on all kinds of stuff about it. Bring it on bitches!
Last weekend I went down to the First Lego League competition at the Augusta Civic center with a couple of other robotics club folks. I was a referee for the game and we brought our t-shirt launcher and shot some shirts to the crowd. We also actually nailed a t-shirt throw a crack in the ceiling of the civic center that on our first shot. It will likely stay there forever. It made me laugh pretty damn hard after I pushed the button to fire it. Whoops! Oh and the Owl's Head Transportation Museum was there!
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| The Benz |
Last Sunday my roommate Nick and I went out Christmas tree hunting while Sam and Ariel stayed home and engineered a stand for it. We ended up finding a pretty good candidate and brought it home on top of the Subaru. Nick decorated it and it looks pretty decent. Best part is how home-like it makes our living room feel. Everyone wanted to hang out there after we put up the tree.
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| Festive as shit! |
Today we presented our awesome project for ECE478, a PID motor controller! It controls the position of a DC motor (lego) with variable Kp, Ki and Kd terms. It works pretty awesomely except the derivative term is messed up a bit and we didn't really mess with it enough to sort it out. Essentially there is too much noise in the system and the microcontroller is taking a derivative of some BS, resulting in a jittery motor. Anyways, it's sweet and I think I might get to keep it cause I paid for most of the parts. Maybe I can get a sweet video of it in action for you guys. It's no
SEGFAULT by any means and it isn't analog either.
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| Lego and PID control nice! |
Wow. I am realizing that my inability to communicate with normal people again. I just speak jargon, that's all I do now..... ohhh bother.
Tyler Saturday! YAY!!!!
Starting to brainstorm Christmas presents too. I shipped my reddit secret santa gift today too! I bought this guy a ticket to the New Years celebration at the Joshua Tree in Somerville, MA. Hopefully he liked it, I should be receiving mine soon too. Definitely buying dad an auto dimming welding helmet.... Ok, I really want to use it alright!?! Is that so wrong?
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