Electronica 2016 – Servo Motor PWMs

As I talked about in my previous post I am going to use a PSoC as a servo motor controller as well as a CapSense UI.  The problem is that I wanted a really easy way to plug the servo motors into the PSoC.  It seems like all of the servos have a 3 wire interface, Power, Ground and PWM.  Here is a picture that I got from Adafruit’s website.

I was originally hoping that I could connect that servo directly to the PSoC, drive a ‘1’ to the power and a ‘0’ to the ground and PWM to the third input.  But, it turns out that these things suck some serious juice (100+ma?) so driving the power with the PSoC isn’t in the cards.  Given them amount of time that I had left, there was not time for a custom board, so I was in the situation of using a breadboard with wires all over the place which is ugly and a bit of a pain.  However, on Thursday I thought that I might find a “Servo Shield” and sure enough there are a number of them out there including this one which I got from Adafruit.  The problem is this shield uses a 16 channel I2C –> PWM driver from NXP.  I am not a fan of doing things with peripheral chips that PSoC can do for itself.  But, when I got the shield this morning in the mail there was a cool prototyping area on the shield.  So, I made my own header for connecting to the PSoC.  Here is the front:

And here is the back:

You can see that I shorted the whole row of ground together with a big blog of solder and wire.  I did the same thing with the power (the middle row).  Then I made a wire from each of the 4 PWMs pins to a good place on the PSoC (which I could drive the pins directly from one of the TCPWMs)

The board worked great on my bench.  The only thing that I have done which is VERY questionable is that I wired the power supply for the system directly to the V5.0 aka VBUS… which I suppose will get me through the conference, but is probably a bad idea (the green wire in the top picture)

As I was flying to Detroit I thought that I might try to see how the I2C->PWM worked… so I read the data sheet for the NXP PCA9685.  It turns out that the chip is pretty cool.  You can set the output frequency by setting a divider value in one of the registers (oxFE).  The number you set is val=round(25e6/(4096*rate)) – 1.  That means for me to get 50hz to drive the motors I need to set the divider to 121.  Then to set the duty cycle each output has a 12-bit PWM where you can set “LED ON” and a “LED Off” count.  For instance to get a 25% duty cycle you can set the On to 0 and the off to 1024.

After I got off the airplane in Detroit I went to get some “dinner” and I wanted to try out the shield so I hooked it up:

You always get a bunch of funny looks in the airport when your table looks like this:

This left me with only one problem.  How to drive the shield PWMs onto something that I could see… I didnt pack my Tek in my carry on (though I suppose I could have used one of those little scopes).  But, I digress.  What I decided to do is make the PSoC echo an input onto on output pin that was connected to an LED.  So, I drew this schematic.  This can only be done in with a PSoC because I used a logic gate in the UDB to flip the 9685 PWM from Low to High so that my active low LED would work right.

Next I fly to Charles De Gaul, the suckiest airport in the first world.  What will I do on the airplane there?  I don’t, but given those empty beer glasses I may sleep.  More to follow when I get to Germany.