Charging Station Design, Part XII – A Pause to Clean Up

Posted 22 March 2017

This last weekend was devoted to a whirlwind visit by the St. Louis family, which includes my 13-year old, growing-like-a-weed, 3D printing enthusiast grandson.  So, I didn’t get a whole lot of time to work on Wall-E2’s problems, as Danny basically took over my entire lab ;-).  So, now that the horde (can one 13 year-old kid constitute a ‘horde’?) has departed, I can get back to some sort of normalcy and make some progress.

At the end of my last post on this subject, I had concluded that I needed to go back and verify the details of the IR homing hardware and software, as the results I was getting didn’t make sense.  So, I set up some experiments where I could carefully watch the raw output from all 4 IR detectors, and the changes from physically blocking one IR LED at a time.  This experiment convinced me that something was definitely wrong with the hardware; at least one detector appeared to be dead, and it also looked like blocking one detector affected the outputs of more than one – strange!

So, back to the hardware; After dismounting the combined charge status display panel/IR detector module and separating the two, and physically inspecting the IR detector module I  found  a bad solder joint (what – a bad solder joint!?  I  never make bad solder joints! – must have been someone else!) on one of the detector connections to the interface  header.

After repairing the bad solder joint, I carefully worked my way through the cabling maze on Wall-E2 to the microcontroller end of the IR detector cable, to verify proper connection on that end.  The connections looked good, so I did some more testing, only to find that one of the IR detector outputs appeared to be dead – it’s analog reading stayed around 4-500 no matter what I did.  Some more physical inspection revealed the problem – my 4-pin IR detector cable was connected to A2-A6 on the Mega board, but I was reading A1-A5, so the A1 input was essentially ‘open-circuit’ – oops!

After fixing this booboo, things started to perk up and act a *lot* more normally! ;-).  However, instead of immediately going back to testing mode, I decided that I needed to get serious about labeling and indexing cables (I use red fingernail polish to index one end of each connector to the corresponding microcontroller pin) and connectors  on Wall-E2, so I would have less trouble in the future with the large number of ribbon cables and loose wires now festooning the robot.   Fortunately I have my wonderful Brother P-touch label maker to help me with this task. As an aside, if you are a ‘maker’ hobbyist like myself, a label maker is an absolute godsend, and I can’t recommend the Brother P-touch highly enough.

After my labeling and cleanup campaign, Wall-E2 is  a lot more self-documenting, as shown in the following photos

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