Getting into the nitty gritty

[hakcenter]

Did you try the nutmeg version ? 

[Rx7man]

Nope, and by the grin I'd say it's 'interesting' as well

[hakcenter]

pspice, nutmeg, get it ?

Having problems with eagle ??

[Rx7man]

I'm getting the hang of Eagle now..  kinda... I probably do everything the wrong/hard way but in the end I get there

[hakcenter]

Eagle is pretty simple, so over thinking stuff generally makes it a pain in the ass to use.

Like, you don't have to put in VIAs to do top layer to bottom layer, you draw your top up to where you want your via, then switch to bottom layer and finish drawing, and it will automatically put one in for you, in the specs that you have near the tool bar, drill hole size, square / circle / octogon etc.

[Rx7man]

I've been working on the output board a bit.. working to have 10 TO220's on it which is pretty ambitious... Also trying to make it selectable for the function of 8 of them (2 dedicated to solenoid duty), so that I can have either 8 on solenoid duty, or 4 bipolar outputs, or 2 full H bridges (to control one stepper)... I like the bipolar steppers since you only need 4 transistors to control them, but not always readily available.

One minor nuisance I have with eagle is when I have some parts that are metric spec'd and my traces just don't want to line up with the pads nicely.

Getting the hang of the making my own parts in the library.. is there a way to copy footprints, symbols, etc from other parts?

[hakcenter]

With eagle, you should specifically work out of a schematic first, make all your nests.

Then when in the board section, is the 5 dots thing, that calculates closest nests. Hit that and it will setup all your stuff, and align you properly.

However if you wanted traces to go places that the calc messed up, just trace over there then end your wire, and it should auto calc to the nearest spot then you can fix the entire trace.

[Rx7man]

OK, I'll try that

[Rx7man]

OK, stepper logic seems to work nicely... at least it drives LED's in the correct fashion... not going to bother with microstepping though. Will still need to work on the library though.  On a test run I clocked it as being capable of doing 1000 RPM with a 200step/rev motor.. that's with the arduino not doing anything else and no delays anywhere.. I think I can make it go faster, but the code would be messier.. I'll stick with neat code for now so I can keep track of it.

[Rx7man]

OK, I'm going to need a hand with the LM2907 VR sensor driver, and figuring out what resistor/capacitor values to use to get what I want...

One I need at 5V->2.5khz for the turbine
One I need at 5V->4.0khz for the vehicle speed sensor, driven off the ABS ring gear in the diff

I pored over the spec sheet and they really lack instruction on how to get the voltage/frequency part of it.. though they give you the formulas to find ripple voltage just fine.