Slot Wheels Part Deux

Success. With a bit of code tweaking, I was able to drive all 3 wheels smoothly with a tiny power supply. It was a matter of making sure I never have more than one powered at a time. Slowing down the motors a hair helped as well. Also, not interrupting the drive to send status messages over the serial port has a way to smoothing the motion. I also figured out how to make the wheels slow down at the end to give the illusion of a mechanical wheel (with far more inertia than these have).

So, moved on to making sure the sensors were working for all 3 wheels. Here the challenge was more of wire management. 3 sensors times 4 wires per = 12 more wires to manage (in addition to the 12 wires needed to drive the 3 motors). Got that sorted and it mostly worked.

The resulting arduino code, which had wandered during development was a mess so I spent some time focused on making that less of a bag of snakes. Managed to clean that up after a day of blunders and mistakes. But now it is solid. The arduino can pick the result (i.e. jackpot or bust) and make it happen.

Up next, adding switches, lights, and sound.