McWire and Opto-Endstops

So I didn't have as much build time yesterday as I normally do but did manage to get the opto-endstops built and mounted. These came along with the GEN3 electronincs that I got from MakerBot. At first, when I poured the contents of the bag O opto-endstops out, it looked like I was in for a bunch of work.

I called up the link that was on the outside of the bag that had the assembly instructions and no problems with assembly except inserting the 5 leads of the optical sensor into the hole. Lining up all 5 spindly leads at the same time was a challenge for me so I trimmed each of the leads at a different length so that they would go in one at a time.

I stuffed and soldered in all of the components except for the connector which I left unsoldered. I wanted to do a fit check at each of the locations before committing to having it on the board. It's a good thing I did because it would have definitely interfered with the Z motor shaft. Given that I decided to go with a right angle header solution.  This option was smartly designed in so it was easy.

After the boards were fully soldered I tested them using the Arduino board I got from Adafruit Industries.  It was a simple cut and paste of the code from the MakerBot sight and the program was running on the board. I did have one problem while testing. At first it didn't work. I checked all my wiring and hookups and made sure that the board had power and ground.  I thought, ok I'll just move on to the next one and get back to this one. Well, none of them worked! Then I was suspicious. I noticed in the photo on the assembly and test web paged used a thick piece of  cardboard so I changed the piece of white printer paper I was using to a piece of cardboard and it worked. In fact now all tested good. I then colored the piece of paper black with a marker and tried that. That seemed to do the trick as well.

Once the boards were working, I started mounting them to the McWire.  Some location were fine and some were iffy. I think I will end up moving one or two of them. I will see as the build progresses.  The one closest to the Z motor had the highest probability of interference.