Deliver for 23/05/2024

Deliverable 5 - Performance update

Week status: ON TIME

During hardware integration stages, a total of 5 design issues were found on two of the developed PCBs (Motors and RobotSupply):

Two of them were related to connector routing and could be fixed in the assembled hardware by simply changing the cable connections.
One issue was related to the circuit used to control the vacuum motor. The MOSFET used for control was mistakenly placed, in a way that did not allow the motor to work properly. The PCB design was fixed and a small module containing only this circuit will be produced to solve this issue.
One issue was related to the output on the charger connected detection. It was fixed by modifying the traces on the RobotSupply PCB to the correct connections, inverting the wiring on the pins 2 and 3 of the LM741.
The last found issue was related to the supply of the relays on the RobotSupply PCB and could not be solved in the current design iteration. Since the relays are responsible for allowing the robot to recharge, they MUST remain operational even if the batteries on the robot are depleted. Also, their operation is only tied to the presence of a charger, so it’s best if their power supply also comes from the charging connector, using a dedicated voltage regulator. This issue will not affect the robot functionalities unless the batteries are completely depleted.

The revised schematics and PCB layouts, with the required fixes as well as other improvements, are the following:

ash-state-chart-revised.png