For a while, Chris has been worried about lithium ion batteries suddenly going up in smoke and setting fire to everything. Now, the risk is real but there’s probably not a lot we can do about it since there are so many items in the house with Li Ion batteries, […]

I fixed the problem with the motor wiring harness on Spot X by physically reordering the pins in the cable. Did I get it right. Well, no of course not. I flipped Spot X onto its back, pulled off the connectors, battled with the pins for 5 minutes, plugged them […]

I’ve done a bit more work on Spot X 1.0. I pulled it to pieces and drilled some holes in the decks to allow me to fit the new electronics I also drilled some access holes in the side of the motor assemblies so that I can run sensor wires […]

I haven’t had a chance to test the software modifications in Spot X yet, because both of the robots are in pieces, but testing on the bench seems to show that the higher motor speeds are in fact better for the controller. I took the chance to add in acceleration […]

While I wait for my lunch to defrost I’ll type this. For the last couple of days I’ve been getting close to my wits’ end with these motor driver boards. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get them to run without overheating. I was certain that this wasn’t a […]

The second line display problem actually wasn’t that simple to fix, when all is said and done. I thought it was a matter of updating the letter count in the PIC when cursoring down to the second line. I modified the PIC code by adding the fragment: I thought this […]

You know how I was wondering about how to display images on the OLED display using MicroPython? No? Hmm. Well, anyway, I was. And I figured it out. Not thanks to all the online articles. Actually I did find a GitHub repository that included a conversion script that turns .png […]