First Drive

I checked the devboard for any last errors and connected it to the motors on the robot!

Final checks

I verified that the KineticBoard Leaf works when it’s powered by USB and by the 5000mAh Li-Ion battery. I did this by writing a simple program that toggles a GPIO pin, and used a multimeter to read the oscillating voltages. It worked!!

Test Drive!

I already had firmware from the design stage, but it was written for a different motor driver so I decided to start from scratch. I created a basic motor drive “class” (structs/functions to go with the struct) in C and set up my CMake project in a way that I could add a demos folder later. Now that I had custom firmware for the TB6612FNG, I wired up each screw terminal pair to the M1 and M2 pins on each motor, and flipped the switch to see it drive perfectly!

It was really relieving to see everything work on first try, and I gained a huge confidence boost in my embedded programming skills.

Future Enhancements

The motors came with 6-pin connectors, and I should have included appropriate receivers for these connectors on the KineticBoard Leaf rather than just generic screw terminals. Currently, I have to connect the 6-pin connector to 6 jumper wires, which is quite the eyesore.