Reattaching the Power Board and Plugging Everything In

After making sure the new transformer was working properly, we replaced the power board and everything we had unplugged.  We then turned on Nomad to see if it worked.  The lights turned on properly but the PC did not turn on.  We noticed then that the plugs that wrapped around from the power board to the back board of the PC were unattached.  We made a guess where these plugs plugged in based on the voltage labels on the pins on the PC board.  When we turned on Nomad the lights on the control panel did not turn on.  We turned off the robot and unplugged everything again.  We realized that the 5-V fuse next to the transformer had blown.  We replaced this fuse and rethought our choice of power plug placement on the PC board.  We eventually decided on the placement which can be seen in the Figure 5 below.  To make sure that none of the PC cards were bad and it was simply our power plug placement which was wrong, we pulled out all of the PC parts and labelled where they attached.  When we turned on Nomad this time, the control panel lights came on.  After a while though, the control panel lights seemed to flicker.  We eventually realized that the panel lights flickered because the pins that control which lights are on were not attached to anything and thus left floating.  We then began reattaching all of the PC parts and making sure Nomad turned on properly after reattaching parts.  After all was working, we tried to boot the computer.  The hard drive on the computer would not boot properly.  We reinstalled Linux on the hard drive and reinstalled the drivers for all of the parts of the Nomad.


Figure 4. Cards and Cables Inside NOMAD 200


Figure 5. PC Board Power Plug Placement
 

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