Belated happy new year to all, it's been a while since my last post I hope you had a great holiday period, I know I did.
Lately I've been testing out the Microchip motor control starter kit with mTouch capabilities. Microchip term this development board as "complete hardware and software tool suite for evaluating Microchip’s ultra-low cost Motor Control Family dsPIC DSCs" which all in all 'does what it says on the tin'. Let me take you through how I went about getting this motor working.
| The Box: | Inside the Box: |
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Also included is the mains power supply (I'd already plugged it in when I took the picture). |
To program this board you will need to download the MPLAB IDE, the C compiler and the demo project. You can find these here:
Once you have all these installed on you PC you are ready to upload the code to the board and get the motor running. I had a little trouble mapping the compiler file paths from the IDE to the C Compilers but after a bit of Google'ing, it was a matter of changing the settings to the right file paths. Nothing major and if you already have the Microchip IDE installed you will not come up against this, it was definitely user error rather than an issue with the board.
Here's a few pictures of the board close up so you can see what is included
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And a video of the board working:
So, here's the thing what do I do next? This is a great little kit to be able to control the speed of the motor with the touch sensitive slider but what can you use it for? If you have any ideas please let me know in the comments below. It would be great to take one of you ideas, build a piece a kit and post a follow up to this post.
Please post all ideas in the comments below