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Apr 30 update - smokin'

A project log for <n>pod, controller board and simulator

Golang hexapod simulator and controller.

hans-jrgen-grimstadHans Jørgen Grimstad 04/30/2024 at 20:180 Comments

This is a little annoying, but I had to spin another revision of the PCB since the CP2102N chip overheated and self-destructed after about half a day of testing Oddly enough, this did not happen immediately. I initially suspected that I had a short on the PCB, but after having smoked the board a second time after having replaced the CP2102N I suspected that there was a brain fart in the design.

I have previously used the CP2103 in other designs and I had the USB VBUS connected directly to the VBUS pin on the chip. Unfortunately, I had not read the data sheet on the CP2102N well enough. It turns out that the VBUS has to be connected to the USB_VBUS via a resistor ladder. I have now updated the design without changing the rest of the layout (, so I don't have to order a new PCB stencil in addition.)

In other news:
The Golang dynamixel driver seems rather unstable and tends to lock up in certain scenarios, so I have now abandoned the plan to stream native DXL2.0 packets over UDP to the board and I plan to instead stream servo angles over UDP and then port the Arduino2Dynamixel driver to espressif/FreeRTOS and let that handle the servos. This wil also make it possible to handle status packets from the servos with a reasonable latency.

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