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 […]
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Working on the Robot
So, I’m really sleepy right now. I didn’t sleep that well and then I spend all day working on my new robot. And then instead of keeping my head down, I decided to write this. I started with the metalwork for the front and rear bump sensors. That involved cutting […]
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Boards are Done
Yesterday I finished off most of the circuit boards for my new robot. I had to harvest some components from existing old circuit boards, notably the modular connectors I am using on the bumpers. The rest of the components were a mixture of new and old from various sources. To […]
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Fixed my Computer
This was the state of my front IO connector PCB after I tripped over the USB cable, yeah not good. I figured I could make a replacement board, but before going that far I thought I’d try to repair the existing one. The first step was to glue the fragments […]
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I Did Another Numpad
I couldn’t find out how to add a caption to the picture. [But now I figured it out …Ed.] I was fiddling with one of the old robot keypads and, same old story, thought I might like to upgrade the hardware so it could be used as a USB keypad. […]
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Keyboard Development
I got to and did a bit more work on the keypad. Here you can see the inside of the keypad with the speaker switch in the top right corner of the case. It fitted nicely into the recess where the original keyboard’s legs would have been, so from the […]
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Keypad Redux
I was rooting around in my box of goodies the other day when I came across this old keypad and thought why not get it working? It’s made from the numpad section of an old keyboard that I got when I cleared away all the old computers from a local […]