Pre-meeting
18 Sept, Friday, was a bad day. 21 Sept, Monday, was also a bad day. Why was it a bad day? Because nothing worked. (I’m just going to exercise my freedom of speech) More specifically, we plugged in our PCB to the power bank, and something went wrong. The very first time we plugged it in, the solenoid actuator ran, but it caused the Raspberry Pi (that was powered with the same power bank) to hang/stop responding. After consulting Tony, we told us that it could be due to a power surge due to a short in the PCB circuit. Cue the debugging process. We failed to figure out what was wrong on 18 Sept, and we also failed to figure out what was wrong on 21 Sept. We did solder male header pins on the PCB and female headers on our components so that we could easily remove and put them in during debugging, which turned out to be an extremely good move.
During the Meeting on 22 Sept
We removed the booster module to attempt to isolate the problem. After repeated testing and failures, with some grand revelation about the reason why the stepper motor only moved in one direction (the code was using the wrong direction pin), and setting respective modules to low power mode when not in use (H-bridge was set to output zero and stepper motor driver’s ENABLE pin was set to HIGH), we finally got the whole thing working. Video of it working (with the voice control) can be found below.
HOWEVER
We increased the voltage from 10V to 12V so that the solenoid actuator can be more powerful, however, the length of the extending part of the solenoid actuator was not enough to activate the button. We’re going back to the MnT lab tomorrow (23 Sept) to try using a servo motor to push the button instead of a solenoid actuator.