20251102 Spinner: There’s Something Wrong with the Circuit

20251102 Spinner: There’s Something Wrong with the Circuit

So, with the revolving LED done, and now I only have to test-fit the front mandibles by searching for the Spinner’s parts hidden in the stash somewhere, I am ready to finalise the Main Board. This is going to be so good that I can foresee the Project move on to Production stage by 2026!

20251102 Spinner: There’s Something Wrong with the Circuit

WTF…. Just when I thought everything was going to be smooth, the bump on the road turned into a sinkhole. The main board has gone through many revisions due to changing of connectors, fine-tuning the layout and so on. It was not until during last week that I started to revise the board’s shape to make sure the 5 rear LEDs can fit snugly without any lead bending, I noticed the problem.

There was some serious error in the circuit which I guess was during my reshuffling the LED connections sometime in the last two years. I did not realise this until I started to take another look at the circuits to refresh my mind.

On the earlier circuit (left), Pin #14 of the ULN2003 goes straight to the slow revolving LED, the one which sits at Gaff’s side of the Spinner. In the 2025’s diagram (right), the same port now connects to the Roof’ revolving BLUE LED. Despite the changes at the Darlington-Pair IC, the output from the microcontroller’s Port #05 remains unchanged. And I did not revise any programming after posting the final video on YouTube.

How Now? Brown Cow?

I suppose the only way to know and to correct the whole circuit is to search for the prototype again, which is somewhere in the

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