Ooops, I fried my OX controller (Arduino Due) and a USB cable!
Never hurts to put a voltmeter from ground on your control board to ground on you computer BEFORE plugging in the USB cable… Anything other than a big fat 0v means you have issues.
Also make sure the main power switch is handy!
Full story below.
Not sure how relevant this is to most, as most people will be using an off-the-shelf PSU at the desired voltage. I, however, have been using two 12v PSU’s chained in series to get ~25v (tweaked the on-board voltage adjustment up 0.5v) To do this you have to isolate one of the power supplies so that you can “float” ground at 12v relative to the other PSU.
Looks like at some point I managed to switch my wiring harness so that the isolated ground was ground for my OX Controller. It all worked fine with my laptop, but I’ve never been super happy running the OX of my main workhorse, so I saved a machine from the recycling pile (a core i7 no less, and a new monitor to boot)
Last night I hooked it all up, tweaked all the settings to get the correct travel per rotation, fired up the main PSU for the Ox and …
Smoke started pouring out of the USB cable. 