Well, i knew this was coming. I didn’t expect it to happen anytime soon, but it did. I was in the middle of testing my ABB because it was starting to have ALL kinds of issues. Such as, in a program I set a certain pin to high and the voltage coming through was not enough to drive a motor I had connected. I measured it with my Multimeter and it was rated at around a little more than a volt. I couldn’t figure out what the issue was, so I checked the battery also…and that said 6.8v, which is perfect. Servos I had used with the ABB worked fine, but not a servo modified into a regular motor (basically, I removed the electronics that where inside the servo, and just connected the motor itself, for continues rotation purposes). And yes, I tested the motor itself, and when connected directly to the battery it ran perfectly. So anyway, as I was still testing, one of the metal leads in the multimeter accidentally shorted the bot board…And puff went the ABB, and I cried “HOLY SMOKES!” (lol, I really did say that). So now here I am, bot-board-less.
So how’d you like my story? jk.
So where was I…oh yeah. So now I am looking for a new micro controller
(Sorry lynxmotion, I just had a bad experience with the ABB).
I was thinking of getting the Propeller chip, but I’m wondering if it can move a group of servos at once. Can someone shed some light on this please? Thanks!
basically you are trying to supply several hundred miliamperes of current from output(s) designed to deliver at most tens of miliamperes… coupled with an indictive load that makes all sorts of high voltage spikes as it commutates. it is highly unlikely just the traces on the bot board are fried, although if the atom pins adjacent to the ones not working are intact and functioning it is pretty amazing.
Since only the traces on the board are burnt, and the atom still seems to be intact, would I be able to use those other pins that contain the inverter (for Basic Stamp PS2 control) for general stuff? like controlling LED’s?
I would think the chip would fry before a trace on the board. I know you said you shorted the pin with the meter, but in the future I would not advise trying to run any motor directly from an I/O pin. You could keep the board for a BS2 and only be out those pin locations IF in fact the traces on the board burnt. You could take sandpaper and buff off the masking exposing the copper trace and solder a jumper wire over the affected area. You can only do this if the trace is accessible. If the trace that is burnt is located under a component part then it really may not be worth your time.
Wowy… dude just put this program into the Atom and see if the I/O pins work.
start:
low p4
low p5
low p6
low p7
pause 1000
high p4
high p5
high p6
high p7
pause 1000
goto start
The power trace is all that’s cooked. There are ways to get the power to the device connected to this I/O group. The I/O pin with the motor connected to it should be dead.
jk.
