IT WORKSSSSS

ok sit tight brodini cuz i got a lot of stuff to tell you

I burned another PCB!

yea, u sure heard that right.

I found out what the issue with the PCB was: the motor driver was in the wrong orientation, which connected the +12V rail itself to a gpio pin, frying the rp2040 entirely. Instead of using my hot air station to de-solder and rotate the driver, I decided to just make another board because I was lazy. The second board ended up not working either, and when I pressed down on one of the legs of the buck converter with a multimeter, the IC caught on fire and started smoking. I ended up needing to use a hot air station to replace the buck converter on that board, so I used it to heat up and fix the driver on my previous board while I was at it.

I now have two working boards

but does it really work?

yup.

how do you know?

because I’m built like that

I dont think so

stfu

ANYWAY…FIRMWARE TIMEEEE

The best way to verify the board works is to test out its main feature: controlling Colosseus’ motors (goddamn I’ve spent so much time on the pcb that I’m still not comfortable with the actual name of the robot).

I wrote some code in C to blink the KineticBoard’s onboard led, built and flashed the .uf2 to the pico, connected it to the board, andd…
…
…
…
IT DIDN’T CATCH ON FIRE! (that’s a first)

it actually blinked the LED like it was supposed to. wow.

With that boost in confidence, I was more inclined to write code for the robot itself. I started scaffolding a library for the robot, which I’m calling KineticLib. So far, I’ve written code to simplify PWM channels because the TB6612FNG motor driver relies on two of them. I tested my library by adding a demo project that makes the robot incrementally increase in speed, and then come back in the same manner. It worked too!

things I HAVEN’T tested yet

• connecting the Pico to USB while it’s attached to the hat
• using the usb-c rececptacle to power other stuff (like a regular rpi)
• observing the effect of forcing the motors to spin while they are connected to the KineticBoard (I tried this briefly and I smelled some type of smoke, but I could very well just be paranoid)

but yea all in all 11/10 experience i would highly recommend trying to make one of these on your own. if you happen to be brave enough to test these before I do, lmk what happens on slack (if you survive).