In my previous blog post, I have faced an issue where my Garbage Collector is too heavy after I have added in some stuff. I have tried rising the voltage by using a Boost Module but the system fails to work. While I'm searching for the reason, I found out that the DC Motor Shield with TLE94112EL can only support 0.9A per output before triggering its overcurrent protection.
Knowing this, the reason for the system to fail is most likely because the motors draw too much of the current under a higher voltage and caused the DC Motor Shield to trigger its protection mechanism and shutdown.
Infineon is doing really good for adding in the protection circuit as things might go wrong if we deal with high voltage without extra careful.
The datasheet also suggested connecting 2 or more outputs from the DC Motor Shield parallelly if a higher current is needed.
But here comes another problem. The DC Motor Shield has 12 output ports which are more than enough for most of the cases, but if I'm gonna connect the outputs parallelly, I will be using up 4 output ports for a single motor which will make me need 16 output ports in total. Of course, the easiest and most obvious way is to purchase another DC Motor Shield with TLE94112EL from Infineon, but for my case, it is close to the submission date of this challenge and I can't afford to hold my progress for a few more days. Thus I try out with the MX1508 DC Motor Driver that I had in my home.
Unlike the DC Motor Shield with TLE94112EL from Infineon, the MX1508 DC Motor Driver has no integrated freewheeling diode in it. Thus, it is not recommended to use the MX1508 DC Motor Driver directly as it might cause a voltage surge when the motor stop or change direction. This voltage surge can cause serious damage to the other components in the circuit. To be safe, I have soldered four diodes to act as freewheeling diodes of the motor and it takes me a great amount of time since I'm not really good at soldering work. Now that I have gone through these hassle of soldering, I really feel how much Infineon has made our life easier by integrating the freewheeling diode.
On top of that, I have also added sliders on the bin so that the items collected can be dropped inside the bin easier.
Lastly, writing and testing a simple program for the DPS368 Pressure Shield2Go sensor.
Basically, I just added in a few lines in the i2c_background Arduino program which is provided by Infineon in their Github: https://github.com/Infineon/DPS310-Pressure-Sensor/tree/dps310/examples/i2c_background
This is how the program works:
Another output pin will later be used to send an interrupt signal to the XMC4200 so that whenever the DPS368 Pressure Sensor senses a high pressure (>100kPa), the XMC4200 will then lower down the gripping force by sending a suitable PWM to the Clamp's Servo.