Tech Log #001: Foam board electronics unit
Today we continued work from yesterday and completed the foam board electronics unit. This contains all the electronics that go in to a Bowie robot. They are on a foam core board to make it an easier test platform, and something we can quickly test with instead of opening up a robot. After this was finished, we proceeded to run some test code. The tests did not work because the Xbees were not communicating. None of the LEDs for the Xbee were lighting up on the brain board. To debug if this was a hardware issue, we could not see the port when plugging them in to an adapter board into the computer. A workaround was to install the FTDI driver, restart computer, then run XCTU. We did finally see that the Xbees exchanged a NI (node identifier) packet. Voltage on the brain board was checked on the Xbee and it seemed fine. Further debugging will be necessary, further tweaking of the code will be necessary. This was never encountered before, and with the electronics been left out in the open, we cannot rule out ESD damage for sure. Aside from this it appears all dc motors, servos, and super bright LEDs are functional.
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- Completed foam board unit (double foam boards)
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- Progress on foam core electronics unit. A single foam board was too flimsy with the weight however.
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- Following the wiring documentation that was written down
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- Xbee that wouldn’t communicate
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- Seeing the node identifier response was a good sign
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- List of bugs
