Sojourner Spring 2020

Sojourner Motor Functions & Telemetry

Author: Alex Dalton

Verification: Robert Pearson

Approval: Chris Hirunthanakorn

 

Table of Contents

Motor Background

For Sojourner, we are using the Greartisan DC 6V 150RPM N20 High Torque Speed Reduction Motor with Metal Gearbox Motor for DIY RC Toys. These motors are small enough to fit into our motor mounts and provide enough force to move Sojourner.

Via the PCB

For our PCB we reorganized the board we were given to make space for the addition of a multiplexer and a full wave rectifier. One way we made space was by changing the jst headers to standard pin headers. We also moved the headers and some of our ic chips towards the top of the board to avoid have large power lines taking up too much space. For our back emf circuit we added a full wave rectifier, which turns the negative values of our motor data into positives, on to the board so our rpm could be measured going forward and backward. We also added a multiplexer IC onto the board so that we could choose which motor we wanted to get our data from. The TB6612FNG motor drivers are the same as the ones on the 3DoT and we are controlling them with the PCA9685PW PWM driver by using the pwm signals with either 100% or 0% duty cycle to produce digital signals that control the direction of the motors. We also use some of the pins as regular pwm signals to control the speed of the motors. The same method we use to control motor direction is also used to control the multiplexer and choose which motor we are receiving data from.

Figure 1: PCB schematic

Figure 2: Board design

The Arxrobot App

The two large sliders on the app determine the speed and direction of all 6 of our robot’s motors. The sliders can be unlinked to run them in different directions and with different speeds. The smaller slider above that determines the position of the servo. The servo command was created in the command section of the app. It is command 0x41 and is an unsigned 8-bit integer because that is the number of bits the servos needs to run. Our servos can move 90 degrees by completely moving the slider over to the right and moving it to the left will move them back to their original position. We chose a slider so that we could adjust how far the servos moved incase we wanted to move in a diagonal direction.

Figure 3: Arxrobot app

Code

To run these motors we use the following code along with the arxterra robot app. Our complete code can be found here.
We use the ArxRobot and Adafruit PWM driver libraries to control our robot. The beginning part of the code is setting up the servos and motors under their respective class objects and defining our pins and commands. We do not define a move command because we are overriding the existing ArxRobot move command rather than making a new one. The three commands we have in our code are move, blink, and servo.
The next part of the code is the moveHandler. The four parameters we receive from the app are the direction and speed from the left and right slider. Two of our motors are on the 3DoT and are operated with the go method in the libraries. For controlling our remaining four motors we are using the PWMdriver with these parameters. The PWM signal sent to our motors determines their speed, the 3DoT works off an 8 bit integer speed, while the pwmDriver generates a 16 bit PWM signal. The map function converts our 8 bit speed values to 16 bit values so the motors will be going the same speed. The next part is multiple if statements to determine what direction the motors should be going.
The if statements send the processor to a function that sets the direction and speed of the motor. To save on pins we are using the PWM pins as digital pins by sending a PWM signal with a duty cycle of 0% for a low signal and a duty cycle of 100% for a high signal.
The third command in our code is the servoHandler. The servo command writeMicroseconds accepts a value between 1000 and 2000. Since our servo slider values are between 0 and 255 we need to map them to the correct values similar to what we did in the motor section of the code.

In our setup code we set the current limit for the 3DoT this is important because the motors and servos can go above the currentlimit. The motors use the most current when quickly switching direction while going max speed.

Troubleshooting

Before starting to work with the Arxterra app it is recommended to read through the getting started section on Arxterra. I would also recommend looking through the Arxterra libraries to have a deeper understanding on how to properly use them and to make sure your board is properly defined. We ran into issues with the servos, but were able to get them working with some help from Jaap from Arxterra, and we also weren’t able to get coolterm to work with the 3DoT, but were able to solve our software problems without it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Sojourner can be run with the Arxrobot app providing commands to determine its direction. Sojourner’s DC and Servo Motors have been tested to work through basic Arduino inputs as well as setup for telemetry. This allow for an easy interface for the user.