Kids and wife are away this week. I had a lot of quiet time to play with the robot. I've decided to name it KiBHuJu ( Kit Bashed Hunk of Junk ). I added the ( duh ) line of code to stop the motor as soon as the turn delay was finished. That helped the doughnuts a bit. Then, I pulled out one of the AA batteries and replaced it with a piece of antenna as a bridge. Now, with the 3V motors, it moves a lot slower.
I went to my sister's for dinner tonight. My nephew just finished robot camp. They create robots with the Lego system ( Mindstorm ? Something like that ). I decided to bring my robot along and show him. My niece loved it. She played with it for a good part of the evening. And then. . . the same stupid contact to the motor sheared off. I now have one working 6V motor and one 3V.
When I got home, I decided to rip the broken 3V motor apart. The brush for the motor is just a flat piece of copper that nests in a piece of plastic. I pulled both out. I stripped and flattened some solid 22 gauge wire and wedged it in the plastic. Now, my brushes are one with the lead wires. I did the same with the 6V motor. Now, all my motors are working again. I just need to decide if I want to proactively redo the others. I will probably wait till they break. At least I now know how to fix them.
My new board came out great. Now, instead of a jumble of soldered, one use mess under the board, I have a plugged in mess on top. But I can use the board for lots of other projects. I can also put in a header that will allow me to connect other boards to it.
My next goal is to put in a header for ICSP. I'm going back to the bootloader. I think I will essentially use the tinyBld program I found. The actual PC code is for Windoze, though. I'll write my own Python version. I'll just change the bootloader code enough to work with the Python program. The problem is that the bootloader code wants to use port B pins 2 and five for the built in USART module. I may rewrite it ( making it longer ) to use the port A pins. I'll just use bit banging routines instead of the built in USART. I don't care if it is longer than 100 lines. I have yet to come near the max program RAM.
Still working on the CAD. Eagle is a great tool. I just haven't put the time in. Tried to get my phone to connect to my laptop. No dice. I've got a Razr. For Linux, moto4lin is the way to go. My version, V3re, is not supported. I'd like to be able to take some pictures and post them. Maybe when my wife gets back, I'll use the camera. All good.
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