Armed with a blinking LED program, I set to work attempting to flesh out the rest of the software for the CNC board. I built and tested a nested vectored interrupt handler, and started trying to port my USB stack from another chip that has very similar USB hardware. As time went on though, the outlook became a bit bleak; A number of things did not appear to be working as intended on this chip, and the manufacturer’s example code included bizzare comments and workarounds for some pretty impactful bugs that weren’t otherwise documented. Not confident that I would be able to make this chip work the way that I wanted, and being less than thrilled with the ease of assembly and some of the design of the CNC Rev1 board, I decided to make a new CNC board.
My design goals would be:
- Ensure the design will work, by using chips I’m familiar with & already have code working on.
- Reduce complexity by only having one motor driving voltage, but still allow that voltage to be changed.
- Reduce the part count per motor, by consolidating components into fewer packages and taking a different design path driving the motors.