My First Pony… I mean PCB.
I have been fiddling with electronics on-and-off for years now, and got pretty 'serious' about it early last year.
I have always just stuck to bread boards and simple prototyping. I never dared dream of designing my own circuit boards, let alone having them printed. Surely that would be, like, hard or something right?
Last night I decided to bite the bullet and find out by designing my first PCB. It is very, very, very simple, and it may fail horribly... but come next pay day, I am going to cross my fingers, and send the design off to be printed (after checking it roughly 10,000 more times).
The board is designed to replace the bread board in my Norby robot, allowing me to plug-in new sensors/servos with less fiddling, and maybe add a few pretty lights ^_^
I have kept the design super simple because it is my first shot, and because PCBs may not be hard to design, but getting them printed isn't exactly cheap (in low quantities).
I will note that some credit must go to The RobotGrrl, as watching her progress reports on RoboBrrd's brain inspired me to get off my lazy arse and give it a shot.
Norby Mark I
Over the past week or so, I have been playing with a new robot I built.
It isn't the most complex robot in the world, but that is fine. I built it mainly as a test platform for limited-input path finding algorithms.
I am using an Arduino Mega 2560 micro-controller with an Ardumoto Shield to drive the engines. The track base is a RP-5 Tank-Tread Platform, and is suprisingly awesome (fast and powerful).
The (only) sensor is a Seeed PING Ultrasonic Range Finder. I 'mounted' the sensor on a 180-degree servo motor so that the robot can look left and right.
To save on soldering, I am just using a bread board to create the circuit. Though (fair warning) I did need to solder the connectors to the motor shield.
I made the mounting boards with a bunch of plywood and my handy dremel tool.
The circuit I am using to connect everything together is fairly simple:
