The imp and board both heat up a good amount, but the light doesn’t flash on the imp and it doesn’t register with the planner.
-It was working earlier. Im using a cable attached to my laptop for power
-I tried attaching a LED in between the 3V3 and GND pins and it lit up, proving there’s nothing wrong the the April dev board
-This happened after I connected the imp and April to a bread board, then to a motor and it didn’t work
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Nick
This sounds very much like you managed to fry the imp with your breadboard hookup.
How exactly were you connecting this motor?!
I set up the general layout for a Blink-O-Matic and replaced the LED with the two ends of the motor…probably should have thought about it a little more first.
I agree you fried it. Measure the voltage between 3V3 and GND. Tell us what it is.
In between the two was 3.3 volts.
That’s interesting. I would have expected the voltage regulator to now be bad. 3.3V is the perfect value. Do you think the april board is getting warm because of the imp? Does it get warm without the imp in the socket?
You still need to get a new imp and april board, but in the meantime, figure out why it failed and how to correctly do the DC electronics for the motor, etc.
What kind of motor are you using? size, voltage, etc.
Even with LED’s, you need to use inline resistors to limit current. A motor is a totally different thing and depending on what kind and what the purpose is will determine the components needed. It usually involves a transistor of some kind.
If you replaced an LED with the motor, what is likely to have happened is that the imp fed some current through the motor (which probably wouldn’t have started running based on the current the imp could provide), and when the imp turned the pin off the inductive spike would have eaten that I/O pin on the imp and very likely the rest of the CPU too.
As many commenters here note, this inductive spike is very dangerous. Warning, DO NOT DO what this web page says, either with an imp or an arduino!
This is much more like what you should be doing:
Oh okay thanks for the explanation and advice :D. Im going to order a new one, do you recommend buying an Arduino?
I’d recommend buying an arduino if that’s what you want to use!
My notes above just reference arduino examples as there are a lot of them out there. The circuit with the TIP120 will work just fine with an imp and provide you with your motor control.