Hello i have been working on a 5DOF robotic arm project and i have a problem driving all the servos.
The arm consists of 6 MG996R servos and a generic Nema 17 stepper motor.
Problem : When i power the thing up some servos twitch or not work altogether even though the signals from the controller are fine. I think it is a power supply and not a signal issue but i feel lost in how i should proceed troubleshooting it.
Connections :
Laptop Power Supply : 18.5 V ,3.5 A which connects to 5 V buck converter capable of 5 A , variable buck boost converter which outputs 6.2 volts for the servos capable of 100W and another buck converter that provides 12 V for the stepper driver.
Logic :
On the logic side the 5 V converter powers the arduino and the controller, the controller connects via 4 pins (Vcc , SCL , SDA , GND) and its component communicate via I2C
The controller components are : ADS1115 ADC which reads 2 joysticks , MCP23017 IO Expander which connects with some buttons as well as the joystick buttons and rotary encoder and at last an 16X2 LCD with a I2C driver for it.
The arduino has an adafruit PWM servo driver clone which gets connected via I2C to the MCU and the servo power is provided by the 6.2 V 100 W capable converter and a DRV8825 stepper driver which drives the stepper motor.
Note 1 : I use the 5 V converter for the logic with some caps to keep the ADC readings and the Joystick voltages stable.
Note 2 : The controller and the stepper are working fine i just wanted to give the full picture to troubleshoot my problem
Note 3 : I know that chaining up all these converters is not ideal and the wrong way of doing it but i am asking here to get a better solution.
Thank you in advance everyone.