Monday, August 20, 2012

Testing

Today I start testing:
Here's a picture of everything wired up to the computer.


Immediately, I notice that the fan is not working. Although the Arduino can produce up to 5V, it can only produce up to 41 mA of current. The fan requires at least .07 Amps to operate. I will have to figure something out, or I'm left with a twitchy fan.

The gas sensors seem to work fine, though as before, they run quite hot. The Geiger Counter also works as expected, though it seems to pick up more radiation than before. I'm not sure what's causing this - perhaps there's something in another sensor that sets it off.

Other sensors don't seem to work at all. I finally figured out that it was because I soldered the connections wrong. Although the solderable breadboards I got are supposed to be like the regular bread boards, these seem to have an extra horizontal line of connected holes, unlike the bread boards I was working with. This threw me off as I was soldering, and, needless to say, I made a few mistakes.

Unfortunately, it takes a long time to re-solder everything since there's so many wires in the way, but I will finish my tomorrow and continue testing tomorrow. 

1 comment:

  1. Maybe you solved the fan problem by now buy there are some easy solutions. I would treat it just like a dc motor. For what you are looking for, I would recommend:
    http://www.ladyada.net/make/mshield/
    Might be a little much for what you need but I can vouch for it. Used it to make a junked rc car work again with bluetooth.
    http://techvalleyprojects.blogspot.com/2011/08/rc-car-hack-part-1-introduction.html

    A simpler approach might be a TIP120:
    http://www.instructables.com/id/Use-Arduino-with-TIP120-transistor-to-control-moto/
    Have gone this route before but needed forward/reverse.

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