MSP430 Project Chris Pendley, George Fournadjiev, Howell Peebles, Brad Lackie (with an assist from Muwafa Albaraqi)

Initial Considerations Knowing that we had a group member (George) who had already done something similar made the process easier Finding out Muwafa was leaving the group was a bit of a hardship

Getting the Board Done Completed processor chip soldering in one night Soldered rest of components onto board shortly after (At this time, Muwafa left the group for Iraq)

What about the Sensor? After some discussion among the group, we decided on a temperature sensor The sensor was a National Semiconductor LM35DT This sensor had a standard temperature range of 2ºC to 150ºC (and a maximum range of -55ºC to 150ºC, but this was dependant on the input voltage)

More Sensor Stuff Standard 10 mV/ºC scale factor (i.e., 0 V -> 0.1 V is a 1ºC temperature increase) Output voltage from -1 V to 6 V

Coding the Sensor After playing around with the software for awhile, we finally figured out how to get the voltage output converted to a temperature output This was successful But….

Problems Begin The output wasn’t consistent! Temperature output would read correctly, then die out (reset). This process would repeat indefinitely, no matter how many burnings took place After some discussion, we decided it was due to some faulty connections on the chip (the soldering failed)

The Last Gasp After doing some more work on it (fiddling around with the connections, etc.), we determined that anything we did there wasn’t doing anything Switching to playing with the power supply, BOOM! Controller starts to smoke Started to smoke after the parallel/series connections were switched

The Learning Process Soldering, by its nature, is a intricate and delicate process – it’s easy to mess up! Programming a chip – in its entirety – is also an incredibly complicated process; use what’s come before you Don’t play around with a power supply too much. Bad things can happen.