Eric’s Status Update for 3/28/2020
What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos
that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into
the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).
All the parts finally arrived and I just soldered together the first PCB. I tested programming the micro-controller and tested the serial interface to it. Those both worked.
When assembling the first one, I realized that I forgot a very essential resistor in the PCB design. This resistor would connect to the base pin of a transistor. To solve this problem, I just soldered that resistor directly to the transistor and then plugged the two into the PCB.
I tested this portion of the circuit before I soldered it to the PCB and had some problems with it. Initially the current flowing through the transistor was much lower than needed. However I discovered that I was making poor electrical connections with the breadboard. I then tested the electrical characteristics of the components individually and they appeared to work as expected. I have yet to test them all together on the PCB.
I also realized that my clock rate was higher than it should be for the voltage range I wish to operate this circuit at, so I spent a lot of time updating the fuse values of the microcontroller to lower the clock rate to 1MHz.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be
taken to catch up to the project schedule?
Now that everything has arrived, we are on schedule to make the first 5 codeblox assuming that everything works.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Two populated PCB’s that can run working hardware tests between them.