Storytime!

While building an Atlas 3d scanner, we decided to make our own shield for it. This wasn’t as complicated as you would expect, aside from a few pin issues from wiringpi and some other details, we got it up and running fairly quickly.

But one thing that did bother us was that the stepper motor was heating up pretty good. As we double checked the voltage, we noticed that the stepper was getting around 10 volts per coil, which is double the rated voltage and it got pretty hot.

Troubleshooting some more, as we moved our schmaltzhaus stepper driver, I noticed that there was a tiny errant wire that shorted between the main power in. And when that happened, it shorted out the full connection to the raspberry pi and the pi itself. Sigh. Hearing a pop from your electrical equipment is rarely ever good.

AND! Doing some troubleshooting on that revealed that we had most likely fried the linear power regulator on the raspberry pi. So now, we have a few on order to reflow back on to the board once they come it. After it’s done, we’ll have a full writeup on the adventure of how to reflow power regulators on your raspberry pi in case you ever fry them on accident.