Conditional check isn't working appropriately on Pro Trinket Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

[eavery6156]

I wrote a sketch for the DRV8833 breakout board that does digital and PWM control of 2 gearbox DC motors. Within the sketch, I wrote a function that will blink SOS (... --- ...) on the onboard read LED if the FLT pin on the DRV8833 board is driven to logic low. The sketch sets up the FLT pin as

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pinMode(flt, INPUT_PULLUP);

and I verified it by hooking up my multimeter to the GPIO pin that is setup to read the status of the FLT pin and ground. I get a value of 4.9v.

My loop looks like this:

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void loop() {
  if(digitalRead(flt) != LOW) {
    // go through digital control functions
    // go through PWN control functions
    } else {
      SOS();
      }
  }


Unless I am having a complete brain fart here, the conditional check within the loop should keep it from going to the SOS function unless there is an overcurrent/thermal shutdown condition present on the DRV8833.

It only seems to happen when I iterate through the digital and PWM functions within my loop() function. If I disable them, it never makes it to the SOS function.

Can anyone provide any insight into why this is happening?

[franklin97355]

What is pulling the flt pin low?

[adafruit_support_bill]

What motors and power supply are you using? With DC motors, the startup condition is electrically the same as a momentary stall condition. And a geartrain adds more friction and inertia to the system, so it takes even longer for the motor to get moving. If your code is starting and stopping the motors, it is possible that you might see momentary tripping of the fault condition.

[eavery6156]

@franklin97355 the pin is brought high by the internal pullup and its driven low during an overcurrent/thermal shutdown on the DRV8833.

[eavery6156]

@adafruit_support_bill I thought about that. I don't see any change when my multimeter is connected but it might happen extremely quickly and latency in the multimeter might not be sensitive enough go pick it up.

For each iteration of the loop function, I could write to serial with the line level reading (digital, since it's on a digital GPIO).

What do you think? What's a good way to approach this?

[adafruit_support_bill]

Most multimeters average readings over several hundred milliseconds. So they are not great at detecting momentary peaks.

Serial output in your loop would probably catch it. Just keep the output short - or use a high baud-rate so you are not limited by the serial transmit speed.

Another approach would be to use the on-board LED attached to pin 13 as a visual indicator. This code should give you a visible light pulse when the fault pin goes low:

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void loop()
{
   if (digitalRead(flt) == LOW)
   {
      digitalWrite(13, HIGH);
   }
   else
   {
      digitalWrite(13, LOW);
   }
}