Dave and I finished our ece 315 lab today with the completion of the bench exam. It went fairly well, though it took us all but the last 3 minutes of the 3-hr timeslot to finish. Below is a video clip of our functional final project, er… functioning.

The idea was to drive the stepper motor at a rate of 10 steps per second, while flashing ‘0’ on the 7-segment display at a rate of 5 Hz. The stepper motor would turn until reaching the optical sensor, at which point it stops and allows the user to manually move it to a new position. When the pushbutton is pressed, the stepper motor turns back on and moves to the optical sensor again.

The cooler part was that on power-up, we also perfectly center the bar underneath the optical sensor by swinging back and forth to detect both edges. That looked really sweet but I didn’t think to record it. Oh well.

Here’s the final construction board after 6 labs’ worth of adding parts:

And here’s the aforementioned clip of the functioningness: (Requires QuickTime, or VLC, or something)