Summary

I spent a lot of time the last few days building and testing the Pinball board.  This morning when I plugged in my oscilloscope to test the PSoC motor driver, I saw this:

Pinball Machine PSoC Motor Driver Bug

Here is a screenshot directly from the oscilloscope.  When I saw this, I wondered what was going on.  Why does the driver pull-up very quickly, but have some kind of RC delay on the pull-down?  This was particularly troubling as the PWM was set to 50 Hz (see on the picture where the (1) Freq is showing the measurement)

Broken Motor Driver Output

Things got much worse when I increased the frequency to 500 Hz.  In fact, the motor driver doesn’t pull-down at all.

Crazy PWM Output

PSoC Motor Driver

So where do I start debugging?  First I looked at the PSoC Creator schematic.  When you look at the schematic you can see that I took the PWM output and steered it to either M0L or M0R (or M1L or M1R).  Then I used a control register to flip it.

PSoC Motor Driver Schematic (broken)

The M0R/M0L signals are used to control the switches on the H-Bridge.  Here is the actual schematic from the PCB:

PSoC Motor Driver Schematic

I chose the Toshiba TB6612FNG motor driver chip for this design.  It has two H-Bridges built in and is the same one that we used on the PSoC 211 Robot.  You can see from the schematics above that I save 1 pin by attaching the PWM input to “H(igh)” and that I pulse either In1 or In2.

Hbridge Schematic

When you look at this table, or the schematic, you’ll see my problem.  I connected one of the inputs to “L”  That means that the NMOS switch that controls the pull-down is always off.  When the PWM is low, there is no pull-down.  That explains the funny RC pull-down, which is just some leakage on that node.

HBridge Truth Table

 

To fix this, I make this change to my PSoC Creator schematic.  In this configuration I get the following:

CR=00 the output = 00 (stop)

CR=02 the output = 1PWM = CCW

CR=03 the output = PWM1 = CW

PSoC Motor Driver Schematic

Now when I run this thing, here is what I get (at my desired 20KHz):

Oscilloscope of functioning PSoC Motor Driver

And finally a video showing the PSoC Motor Driver working:

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