I2C Wiring Update

 AMOS was taken out for testing a couple of times this week, but unfortunately there were issues with its performance. It would startup and spin around in a circle, without getting any valid data from the electronic compass. After re-powering, it would cease to work altogether. Some of the re-wiring that I had done the week before to clean things up and get more stable power levels had mistakenly wired the pullup resistors on the A to D converter to +5 V instead of the +3.3 V level that the Raspberry Pi 3B+ computer uses for its logic signals. Also, the compass and realtime clock module were both being powered by the +5V supply line, when in fact they should have been powered by the +3.3 V supply, since the pullup resistors that they have wired directly on their circuit boards were connected directly to the input voltage pins of their respective circuit boards.

Even with the I2C pullups wired to the wrong power supply voltage, it still worked. Or rather, it worked when the propeller was not being used. If the propeller speed was ramped up very quickly, the compass module would often fail catastrophically, requiring nothing less than a full system shutdown and powerup to get it working again. Probably the Pi could usually sink the required amount of current to keep the I2C clock and data lines at the right logic levels, but the added system noise that resulted from quickly turning the propeller to full speed must have created some issues. The initial thinking had been that there was too much noise in the +5 V supply for the I2C devices to function correctly, so I moved the DC-DC converter for generating this voltage closer to the Pi and added a large capacitor (1 mF) between +5 V and GND. It didn't help. After a number of tests, experiments, and hours spent searching the Internet, it slowly dawned on me that the devices should be wired in to the +3.3 V supply instead of the +5 V supply. The one exception to this is the LiDAR module, which still uses +5 V for its power supply, but (when needed) its documentation recommends installing pullup resistors to the logic level voltage, which in this case would be +3.3 V. Because there are already 4 devices with pullups on the same I2C bus though, no pullups for the LiDAR module were required. 

Once everything was correctly wired up to +3.3 V it worked great! I was able to ramp the propeller speed quickly up and down without any catastrophic issues. Occasionally a compass data sample would timeout or be missed, but the device always recovered and kept working without needing to reset things. 

A second significant fix was made this week for backing up and restoring the configuration file that AMOS uses. Sometimes if a user switches off power to the boat while the software is writing to this configuration file, it corrupts the file, leaving it as a zero byte file. This would cause AMOS to crash the next time that it booted up. The solution was to backup the configuration file every time on powerup that it is read successfully, and resort to this backup in the event that the original file gets corrupted. Initial tests seem to indicate that this system works. 

I am looking forward to building the next prototype version of AMOS. Most of the parts for it have been ordered, and I'll pick up some insulation foam sheets from the local hardware store to construct and shape the hull. This time around, I would like to build the hull shape from the glued together insulation sheets, as before, but then use that shape to make a silicone mold for quickly making additional shapes. The additional shapes could be made with a two-part foam mixture, which would cure in the silicone mold and could allow for electronics boxes to be easily inserted into the hull structure while the mixture is curing.