Battle Blimp Boards. Motor Drivers

Last Sunday  we ran the second part of the aerospace club board building workshop.  Again it went pretty well, I was rather pleased at the turn out given how busy everyone is at this time of year.   We finished up most of the megamini boards and made good progress on the Battle Blimps Shield.  (We really need to crystallize on some consistent names for these things)

This afternoon I wrote a partial port of the Adafruit motor driver library.  Once it compiled, it worked first time!  That never actually happens in real life.

From Battle Blimps Boards.

See, it can even drive a motor backwards and forwards.

I'll try  add some photos to the album over the next few days but sadly it looks like we all worked hard on Sunday and didn't actually take any pictures of the build :P

Building the MegaMini

On Sunday the canterbury aerospace club populated the first of 2 PCB's for the battle blimps competition.  Hanna took some great photos and video of the build day.

It went reasonably well and we got the maple bootloader onto a few of the boards.  Next week we will run the second half of the workshop where we build the battle blimps shield which we will be using for communications and motor driving on the blimps.   We will also finish up the few boards incomplete megamini boards

It was great fun to use the pick and place machine and looking at solder paste under a microscope is amazing.  It looks like a pile of ball bearings, I strongly suggest you try it some time :)

Quite a number of the group had never even soldered before and I think throwing them in the deep end and starting with surface mount has been quite good.  There seems to be a perception that surface mount is really hard when actually it isn't that bad.