kbrown

Finally got to solder it together. Everything seems to work as expected too. Getting somewhere now

Thanks guys. Tonight I made these super high tech plastic component leg formers to aid getting the hall effect switches in the right place

Thought I'd practise a bit more with this dry film photoresist stuff and do a sort of a silk screen legend on the other side of the board. Seems to be really hard to get a nice and even result. This will do for now. Think I'll try ink next time...

Still don't know what it's the best way to apply this dry film solder mask stuff. Failed several times due to various reasons. This is the best I could do. Not perfect but I'm not wasting any more time on this. It'll work just fine...

Finally after struggling for a couple of nights I managed to etch a PCB I can work with. Certainly not the best I've made but not too bad considering this was the first time I used dry film for developing the board. Seems I got a pretty bad roll of it as half of it is so wrinkly it was unusable. Anyhoo I'm going with this even though there's a few spots I have to fix. 

Magnets in place. Had to make some space for them inside the housing. So far so good.

Here's a basic test of the motor and the mechanics. Everything seems to be working as expected. Plenty of torque, barely any backlash and power consumption is very low when the motor isn't used. Due to the gearing the motor does not need to be energized to hold the current position.

I bought an Opticstar 2" Manual Filter Wheel and the plan is to stick an arduino controlled stepper motor on the wheel perimeter to turn it. Magnets and hall effect switches will be used to keep track of the position and which filter is active. The mechanical design is done using the open source apps LibreCAD and FreeCAD. G-code for my CNC mill is produced using HeeksCAD and the mill itself is controlled by LinuxCNC. Electronic design is done using the awesome KiCad which recently has had a massive boost by the propeller heads at CERN.

The mechanics is almost done. Still need to etch the PCB and put it together before the real fun begins writing the firmware

Clear skies,

K