Bad Day

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, August 7th, 2008

It was a pretty bad day at my research lab today (aka: my desk next to the kitchen table, the kitchen table itself, and the floor) .

I was playing around with the Pololu uSSC’s, they were working great after I set the servo numbers!

But, I was a little troubled by two things.
1) When the program is sent to the Arduino, the Pololu uSSC gets a fatal error because of all the goobley that goes on the TX line when transferring the program to the ATmega.

2) When I pressed on the servo, the voltage drain was visible when the boards flashed on and off

For the first problem, I tried so many things with switches and crazy circuits … but it didn’t work. So I just used a jumper from the Arduino TX to another row where the SIN’s would be on the Pololu uSSCs so that I would only have to unplug one wire instead of two each time I was trying a program. That was OK.

For the next problem, I supplied 3 more volts in the form of two rechargeable AA’s. But… after looking at a breadboard for so long your eyes start to go crazy… I inverted the poles.

It wasn’t even a second later when the board became so hot that I panicked, tearing it out of the board. But, a cloud of smoke lingered in the air. At that time I knew it was toasted… even one of the batteries was smoking.

So at the end of the day, I have one extremely dead Pololu uSSC, one that doesn’t work, and one dead RBBB. I *think* the RBBB isn’t working because the ATmega isn’t working

So… yeah… pretty bad day. The lack of sun week after week after week doesn’t help either. It’s like living in a groundhog hole You get some sun, but once you go out, it disappears.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.