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Old 12-19-2008, 01:17 PM   #22 (permalink)
MPaulHolmes
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Location: Maricopa, AZ (sort of. Actually outside of town)
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Michael's Electric Beetle - '71 Volkswagen Superbeetle 500000
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Thanks! I've been thinking that a highly modularized kit (not lots of skill needed to assemble, maybe just time) might be good. Once a program is written and works well for the controller, the ATMega8 chips are only about $1 each, and the STK500 programmer takes less than a second to program the chip, and software is free, but don't tell Microsoft that. Maybe if I assembled a bunch of logic boards (the low power half), and cut the bus bars (the heavy copper B-, B+, and M-) for the controller, and etched the heavy 4 ounce (per square foot) copper PCB that will be bolted to those bars, and maybe soldered the mosfets and capacitors to the heavy board, the rest would be maybe a couple hours of work assembling that someone without a lot of tools could do?

Update: Some anger! I programmed the chip, built the low power half of the circuit, and the dang LED didn't come on! It's hard to use a $2.99 volt meter to measure voltages that are going from 0 to 5 volts thousands of times a second. My oscilloscope will probably be here really soon, since the probes and power cord came yesterday! I need that thing to see what's going on!

Update 2: I found a mistake in the assembly of the circuit. I hope this fixes the problem.
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