Test the motor by connecting
Test the motor by connecting it directly to the battery pack. If it turns, the motor is fine.
Unless you’ve shorted something out, chances are that your board is fine. Check your solder joints carefully. Double and triple check your code.
First, check your
First, check your connection. Have you connected the servo to Digital pin 0? Have you connected it correctly? The ground wire of the servo must go towards the edge of the board; the signal wire goes towards the chip socket that should either have the resistor DIP pack installed, or a single resistor in-line with Digital pin 0. (You do have that installed, right?)
If everything is installed properly, check your software. Start a new Picaxe BASIC program. Enter in:
servo 0, 75
wait 2
servo 0, 225
wait 2
servo 0, 150
wait 2
See if that works.
It sounds like you bought
It sounds like you bought the Parallax Ping sensor. Do a search on this site or on the Internet and you will find BASIC code for the Ping.
Can a motor be connected directly to the L293D Motor Driver IC
I was just wondering can a motor be connected directly to the L293D Motor Driver IC? If yes, how? I am unable to get one of my motors working. I’ve tried all of the solutions described above but still no success. Please reply soon.
Tragedy strikes…
I was assembling my LMR SHR today and one of the ears on the motor that holds the power wire broke off. I have no idea how to fix that. I am so upset it isn’t even funny. I don’t even know if I will try to complete it now or not. Does anyone know of a better motor to replace the one from Solarbotics? I bought the motors like the ones listed in the kit list.
I don’t remember where I read it…
But I have done it before when this happened to me. You take a male pin header and hold it with a pair of pliers and heat it up with your soldering iron. Then when it is hot enough to melt the plastic you push it in right next to the tab making sure they are touching. After that you can can just solder to that. Hope that helps. I will go and take a picture for it now to show you.
Here’s a picture.
Thanks for that. I may just
Thanks for that. I may just order another motor. I hate that something brand new out of the box is already broken like that.
I’ve done this before too
I’ve done this before too (maybe that’s where Joe saw it?). Check my post on this one.
I’m actually still using this fix to this day in my robot Penny.
Yep.
That’s were I saw it. Thanks for that. I used this on my beverage bot.
I did this, but it still doesn’t work
I took a pin and use the soldering tool to melt the plastic (the little white plastic by the motor contacts). When the plastic was melted, I put the pin there and use soldered it. Then I used female-female header cables to connect the pin on the motor to the board. When I tried to progam it, the wheel wouldn’t move. I only did this to one wheel though, do I have to connect them both for it to work? I really don’t want to connect them both, because then I would have a hard time removing it if it doesn’t work. Any ideas to why it doesn’t move?
Am I fried?
Hello everybody,
So I’m pretty new to this. I’ve been working on a LMR SH robot with the Picaxe 28 board (following Fritz’s specs). I had everything up and running successfully hardware-wise. Both wheels were spinning on command and the servo was looking side to side. I had the powersupply hooked up with a simple male/female connection halfway to the board as my on/off switch. Then, two things happened. First, my bot took a tumble. Nothing major though. Just fumbled it onto a car seat from standing height. Everything seemed to be in good order. Then number two, I went to resoder the male pin on the power supply V+ cable. As I was doing this, I accidently pulled out the connection on the other end of the V+ wire, where it was directly soldered to board. It was tough to get the thing soldered back on as the solder filled up the very small board hole. The problem is that I have this mother of a soldering gun. It’s runs 140/100 Watts, which I suspect is too strong. It’s tip is also really too big to properly get at the smaller sized wholes, especially with other components crowding in (I’ve gotten myself a slimmer, 25W model now though). The poit is I’ve checked the connections in everything and they seem ok, but when I hook everything up, nothing responds. When I run it through PICAXE this error log comes up: Error: Hardware not found on /dev/ tty.usbserial-00001004. Finally, when I take a voltage reading touching the board’s V+ and G pins, I read 4.17 V.
How do I know if I’ve fried something in the circutry of the board? How do I pinpoint what the problem is? Any ideas whats going on here? All help welcome. And thanks for taking the time to get this far into my message. I really appreciate the community’s help.
Ian
Hook the batteries directly
Hook the batteries directly to the motor to test if your repair worked or not. If it works, then check your programming.
It does sound like you
It does sound like you damaged something, but it’s hard to say.
Can you post a clear, focused picture of your board? Make sure we can see your repair clearly.
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(No subject)
Yes hard to tell
It sounds like he has a multimeter, or a voltmeter at least. On that note, I would test the voltage on the legs of the PICAXE itself. Although you have power at the pins, as ig noted, a trace could be fried or maybe something broke during the tumble. You can touch the probes to the exposed segments of the chip’s power supply legs and see if it’s getting power or not. You can do that for the L293D as well.
Yes it can. But instead of
Yes it can. But instead of me explaining it, it would be a lot easier if you tried to Google L293D Motor Driver IC - There’s one trillion fine drawings and instructions out there 
Yes, that sounds about
Yes, that sounds about right. Thanks guys. I do have a multimeter and it reads steady voltage at the V+/grd pins themselves, but I hadn’t broken out the PICAXE schematic for the board and chip pins, etc. I’ll hook up the power supply and get a bit more systematic about narrowing down the problem.
I do know that as I was desperately trying to get the huge tip of the too-powerful soldering iron to touch the solder plugging the V+ pin hole, it touched and pulled off a liiiiiiitle bit of the black coating surrounding the whole itself. I suspect that this is what you mean by “trace” and it may indeed be the problem.
Well, thanks guys. I guess this is learning, huh?
Ian
It is a time honored
It is a time honored tradition that electronics all contain “blue smoke”, which is essential to its operation. The slightest mis-step can cause the blue smoke to escape, rendering the device useless. ; j
