This damn robot is starting to wear me down. I etched another batch of PCBs and constructed the ones I needed urgently. The modified sensor breakout board went together pretty well and testing has confirmed that the bump sensors now work as expected. I also constructed a new sonar deck […]
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Steps Forward, Steps Back
Okay, things are sort of going ahead with the robot. I soldered up the old motor controller this morning, stripping components from a spare board. I could have hunted around for the FETs I needed but I’m pretty sure I don’t have enough and I didn’t want to risk using […]
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Mistakes Were Made
And things were going so well. I spent yesterday printing off and installing the battery mount. It’s the same design as the one I put onto old Spot X, but modified to fit the new battery packs I’m using. It’s not a fantastic design but it works. I also finished […]
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Breadboard Modification
For a few years now I’ve had a collection of breadboarding modules that I’ve used for prototyping. They’ve all had an Arduino Uno mounted in the top corner. Since I started using Raspberry Pi Picos, I came to the decision to replace one of the Arduinos with a Pico. So […]
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It’s Adowable
So, I didn’t realise how tiny these things were. All the promo pictures have them looking like Nokia phone displays but no. They’re literally an inch square. Anyway in my last order I bought 2 of these little OLED displays because the Raspberry Pi Pico has I2C channels coming out […]
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Some Things Don’t Change
I finally got around to ordering a new roll of solder. Yes, I bought leaded solder because screw brain cells, what have they ever done for me? What I find interesting enough to spend time writing this post about is that I purchased it from the same supplier as the […]
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Drawing my Pareidolia
So, I swear the original on the left looks more like a grumpy man in real life than it does in the photo, but anyway, that’s a photo of a piece of popcorn that’s been sitting on the floor mat of my car for the last week or so. I’ve […]
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Working on the Sonar Deck
I did a bit of work on the sonar deck for the robot. The first task after cutting out the boards was to solder the component pieces together. I use PCB material for the mechanical structure of the deck and include traces for electrical connections. The way it turns out […]
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This and That
Well, things have been going a bit slowly for a few days. I discovered that I very nearly made a huge mistake on the robot. I thought I would be able to shift the position of the bumpers upwards to clear the USB port of the Pico. That wasn’t actually […]
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Added the Bumpers
Today I spent all morning finishing off the bumpers for the new robot. I decided to try using acrylic for the actual bumpers, so the first task was to saw them out of the sheet. Fortunately the sheet had a bit that was the perfect size for the job, so […]