Hi! Welcome to Week 12

This week’s assignment was add an output device to a microcontroller board I've designed, and program it to do something!

What I Did This Week

For this week, I am going to make a story board in the shape of a box, that is going to be controlled by a button that will cause the stepper motor to rotate, and I will also use lights that will be placed in the box, and will cast it’s shadow on a wall. I designed the box using festi, I simply added the dimensions that I would want for my box and the type of joint I want and the website generated the 2d plans for the box ready for cut, you can download my box from here . Since I do not have CorelDraw on my laptop, I prepared the file using InkScape, with was a bit tricky but this tutorial helped me maneuver with the program, and I added the drawings I want on each side, Here are the files for the drawings, Which were made by my sister Diana Habashneh. Next, I added a circle in the center of the sides, where the rod will pass through, and I then laser cut the plans.
So now back to CorelDraw, I made the dimension of the drawings Hairline, and then proceeded to cut it using the Laser machine. After I finished this par, I drew the gear and the base, and again cut the using the laser machine.
After this part, I prepared the board that will be used along with the device. I wanted the device to be able to operate anywhere and so I added a micro USB port.
I assembled the pieces together, and now I had to think on the rotating mechanism, and the electronic board. Here’s the schematics, and the board. Also, since I was using a stepper motor this week, I checked the data sheet, and also added an H bridge driver to the board and connected it according to its pinout.
Here you can download the traces, holes, and outline.



I soldered all the electronic parts to the board except for the motor, but it turned out after testing the board that I had burned the H bridge. I removed it and the soldered a pins extension, this way I could avoid burning it again as it's a sensitive part.




Before programming my board, I had tested this program using an Arduino board and bread board just to ckeck if my code did what I wanted it to do, this is the code I used:

 

#include  <Stepper.h> 

const int stepsPerRevolution = 48;  
int PushButton = 5;
// initialize the stepper library on pins 8 through 11:
Stepper myStepper(stepsPerRevolution, 8, 9, 10, 11);

void setup() {
  pinMode (PushButton, INPUT_PULLUP);
  myStepper.setSpeed(30);

  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
  int readPushButton= digitalRead (PushButton);
if (readPushButton == 0) {
  Serial.println("clockwise");
  myStepper.step(stepsPerRevolution/6);
  delay(500);

}
}

This is a video of the stepper mototr working:



Now, I had to put together the parts, and here how they looked. I fixed the lights on the bar in the middle (the axis) and turned it on. The design worked, but it had several things that will have to be fixed. The body wasn’t stable enough, so I am going to fix that after finishing my final project by maing the size of the frames smaller, and I’ll use only one thick acrylic hexagon piece that will be fixed to the bar in order to make the body more stable, and also I will use a thicker base.