Saturday 12 September 2009

And one was where 3 should be...

I have set out the remaining components for the first stepper motor driver board. You can see the re-positioned edge electrolytic capacitor.


The two enormous (in comparison) black components on the right are the stand-in resistors, with their leads bent to fit the board's contact pads!
The component in the middle of these two is the high power header connector - you may remember that's the part I ordered in numbers way over the top, because actually you only needed one, which is broken into 4-way parts. The first go caused a 5-way part (!), so after that I tried needle-nose pliers (too wide), and then cutting the plastic with tin-snips. This worked a treat, but I was glad I was wearing eye protection because each cut part fired off, and bounced off 2 or 3 obstacles before disappearing! I would see where it went first and second and then lose it! Took me a while to find it, based on the landing noise it had made!

See the blue header at the bottom? That's the only one I have. Remember there are 3 stepper motors, and therefore 3 driver boards? Somehow I failed to order 3 of these headers!

So for future orders, so far, the list goes:
  • 2 more headers, part 110-3949 from Farnell
  • 1 more ceramic capacitor, 100 nF, part 165-0887 from Farnell
  • and 1 green 1206 2 mm LED, which I might get from Farnell as well, say part number 1226372 at 6p.
I'm not ordering yet - let's see how many other parts need replacing.
So it will be a while before I finish these three stepper motor driver boards.

2 comments:

  1. Great blog as usual, Hazel. I've been meaning to write up my first experiences of surface mount, but you beat me to it. I'm away from home at the moment and I don't really want to write a full post on my iPod, but I'll do it when I get home. I blew my first driver chip.

    ReplyDelete