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January 28, 2007
All systems go (?)
Excellent news! The Pulse-Width-Modulated (PWM) signals that control the three independent blimp motors are working just fine under remote control. This means we can control power and direction independently, as hoped. There was a worry that the directional control would not work when all three motors outputs were enabled... but on that front, all systems go.
The Blimpbot also has an onboard 3.3V voltage regulator, to keep the voltage to our future 3-axis accelerometer constant and within acceptable levels. The voltage is then routed to a reference pin on the microcontroller. Since we didn't buy the accelerometers yet, I was trying to use this pin to measure the battery's voltage. (i.e. 3.3V/(Battery Voltage) = Pin value) However, I'm just getting '0' back from the Analog-to-Digital converter. This isn't critical to flight, so I'm going to quit on this for now and hope for a response on the Microchip forums.
In other news, Jason's excited that he might have enough leftover weight to add fun accessories to the Blimpbot. For example, maybe something like electroluminescent wire.
Posted by jrpowers at January 28, 2007 11:13 PM