cybermace5's Journal: 8-/

I'm sick. Sore throat, fever, chills, the works. I paid $8.64 at the gas station for a pack of DayQuil, hope it works. I have a meeting later today to investigate guarding for the hole punch units on the presses.

Can't complain much, but some electrical engineering would be nice. AutoCAD is getting old. At least I get some decent freedom in design; we have an application that requires air-cylinder-activated rollers. The wheels were made of custom cut rubber on custom turned steel cores. I'm going to use inline skate wheels instead. A lot cheaper, available everywhere, should save maybe $60 per wheel, which is considerable when you're talking about buying 400.

Fried a robot the other night, I had some new motor control hardware soldered in, and there must have been a short. The PIC got pretty toasty. That board was too old anyway, I have enough parts to rebuild it from scratch. I'll separate the boards too, one dedicated motor control board and one processor board. I have nice setup for motor control, a GAL22V10 monitors three inputs per motor. One input is for PWM, the other two control direction. The GAL makes sure the H-bridge doesn't burn itself up by turning on two transistor on the same side of the bridge. When both inputs are active, the two bottom transistors are activated for regenerative braking. Using a GAL might be overkill, but it means I can reprogram the control scheme whenever necessary.

My eBay stepper motors are on the way, so pretty soon my CNC machine will be in development. Servos might be a better way to run a CNC machine, but I don't plan to have accurate position encoding yet.

Anyway, back to the grindstone.