Week 10

With the new package that arrived I immediately knew it was the new printer head. Its a shame it only came on Thursday. Today, Friday, I was finally got the board they originally gave me to hook up to the printer head and I tried to program it. After a few hours of trying to get it to run I found out that the heater is a straight through and through on my board. I looked at the schematics and there it was.



Fantastic. The two only things I was trying to control weren't even available for me to interact with. So then shortly after that, I learned that a board was being made, soon available, was going to be interacting with the heater and the thermistor. However, it was not going to be soon enough.



I talked to other people working on the same board as me and it seems there was a testing board made for the heater and thermistor (and a bunch of other things...). so here it is, I tapped into it with my pseudo 'microcontroller circuit'. The wires are there connecting to this board here.

Then, I hooked up my evaluation board up to the bread board, with all the right components, allowing it to function and control all the proper parts. The evaluation board, which houses the microcontroller, allows the microcontroller to shut my MOSFET on and off, which allows me to switch the heater circuit on and off. And with the testing points tapping into the thermistor, I'm able to record the resistance for the thermistor, which correlates to heat. With my code I've already made, everything I needed was in place to control the heater in the printer head and turn it off when it reaches a set point. This is as close to a 'real world' scenario for testing as I can get. I'm excited to see how the results show next week.