I fixed the problem with the motor wiring harness on Spot X by physically reordering the pins in the cable. Did I get it right. Well, no of course not. I flipped Spot X onto its back, pulled off the connectors, battled with the pins for 5 minutes, plugged them in again and then realised I’d swapped over the connectors for the wrong side. Like, you know that moment where you finish something and you sit back to reflect on how well it went and enjoy the sense of achievement? That’s precisely when I realised my mistake.
So I unplugged the connectors, reverted to the original configuration and then reordered the pin assignment for the left motors. I’m not entirely happy with the state of the pin connections, because my practice over the years was to solder the wires directly to the pins, instead of crimping them. That’s convenient and allows for reuse of the pins at the cost of a mechanically sound joint. I noticed that a number of the pins seemed pretty wobbly on their scraps of wire. I might think about refitting the cables with crimped connectors.
In testing, the robot movement now matches the UI, so that’s great. I also charged the battery which seemed to reduce the motor slip. I think the battery I am using is just a little tired, as it charges to 12.3v and I think it should go higher.
I managed to reuse the Pico from the Spot X mainboard that I made with perfboard. I was able to desolder it with the aid of my hot air gun and then cleaned up all the connections with the soldering iron and solder sucker. That allowed me to fit it to the header pins of the spare board without much difficulty. What I think I’ll do with this board is cut a trace and direct 5v to a couple of the connectors so I can run one of my new old LCD modules. There’s a connector labeled I2C that I should be able to use for that purpose. I need to do the modification anyway, to get the sonar module to work, so 2 birds.
At some stage I need to figure out these damn batteries, but I think the modifications to the PIC code need to come first.