Today, we spent the first twenty minutes of class going over everyone's weblog. We made sure everything was up to date and organized. Then, we spent the rest of class working on our independent projects. Lucas, Awe, and I decided to power the iBoat motor using the car battery we have been using, and control it using the phidgets motor control board. To do this we first plugged in the iBoat motors positive (red) and negative (black) wires. Then, we plugged in the USB cord into the phidgets motor control board and into our computer so we could control the motor. Then, we have to plug the positive and negative wires into the phidgets motor control board and into the car battery. When we connected the battery to the phidgets motor control board, smoke instantly started to come from the power source (on the phidgets motor control board.) As soon as we saw the smoke, we immediately disconnected the wires from the battery. We think the circuit shorted out and started to smoke because we needed a bigger wire to connect to the battery. Though we did not have enough time to control the motor because of the smoke, we did get a chance to see that the motor is capable of going very fast. Next class we hope to try this again with bigger wires, and if we are successful with this we are also going to try and figure out how to control the motor using the phidgets motor control board wirelessly. Because the motor is too fast to take the iBoat into the HPA pool, the next step in this project would be to take the iBoat into the ocean with the cameras we used last class.
cbradley
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