Monday, February 28, 2005


Some progress on the bot. A simple thing really but big for me because I am so horrible at mechanical stuff. I had planned to go to Home Depot to get the drawer knob but with all the snow I decided against it. So, I tried to canniblize the knob on my CBABot. I'll have to get a replacement from Mike. Anyway to my surprise I was able to find a standoff of almost the exact correct length that fit into the knob! My robot is now balanced pretty well. The sensors are all equi-distant from the ground. Meaningful testing of the bot is coming soon. I can feel it. I just need to put on light shields on and hook up the H-Bridge to the MCU. After that, its all software. :) Posted by Hello

Monday, February 21, 2005


This is a better close up of the working board. You can see three jumpers. One is a forgotten trace, the other two were due to short circuits caused by the mis-alignment of the top and bottom Press-N-Peels. Next time I will keep stuff further appart and try to hone my alignment skills. Posted by Hello

WooHoo! The etched board is a sucess! All the circuits are up and running now. In the photo the debug program in the microcontroller can be seen pumping out the detection state of the IR line sensors over the MAX232 on the etched board. This has left me with a fairly positve feeling about hand etching. I will definately do it again.  Posted by Hello

Sunday, February 20, 2005

There was a new arrival at BDO this month as well. I'm really sorry I din't get a photo of this fellows bot as it hada giant LCD screen on it. I've never seen such an extensive UI on a mini-sumo bot. There were a few levels of menu that one could click thru via remote control. Neat stuff!

Well, I forgot my camera for this month's BDO. Nonetheless it was a blast once again. Shown above is the product of my efforts! This is my newly etched power distribution board! It had a few troubles: the sides were not perfectly aligned and that meant that a couple traces that passed near pads got shorted to the pad when I put the component in. Also I left a few traces hitting thru-hole pads on the top side. These were difficult to solder. I learned that I need to use bigger traces, keep traces well away from thru hole pads and only connect to thru-hole pads on the bottom. Posted by Hello