No Movement

I would like to know if I may have cooked the Pico board.

I had a student do some soldering for me (said he knew how) and he actually did a nice job but he wired the power supply backwards and I didn't notice until the unit got REALLY hot.

I unsoldered and re soldered the power supply but I get nothing from the unit. No movement, nothing. The Raspberry pie still works fine but there is not life to the robot.

Now it could be just that I have done something wrong with the scripts or the pico board is fried.

Thoughts?

Timothy Freeburn's picture

It is possible you have fried the FET's (the smaller black devices of which there are 4), or it could be a fuse, supply or software problem.
If the FET's are dead, replacing them (or the picoBorg) is the only option.
In any case, let's go through a couple of diagnostic steps and if we can't get it working, we'll organise another to send out to you :)

There is a fuse on the PicoBorg. It's a surface mount device which looks a bit like a resistor and is right next to the V+ soldering connection. It's possible it is blown, if you have a multimeter, check resistance across it (it should be near 0 ohms)

Can you check if the I/O pins are turning on and off. Again if you have a multimeter, you could check these pins are going from 0 to 3.3V.

Or if you have another way of checking the I/O pins such as different add on board, this could be useful.

Are you moving a PiCy robot or different motors and is the supply a battery or a power pack?

BohBlesku

krispin's picture

The fuse is running at a 2

Have not checked the pins yet

I have purchased a piborg kit from you good folks so these are your motors.

I am powering the Raspberry Pi with its own powersource

motors are powered with the battery pack you provided.

More than likely this is something I am doing wrong. Rather than the hardware.

krispin's picture

Sorry for the delay in checking the I/O pins. It looks as though the board is alive and well. So I am not sure what is going on. I have only just got back to the project so I will just keep on trying.

Cheers,
Keith Rispin

Subscribe to Comments for "No Movement"