scooter

Given the pain with dealing with the superglued sensors and power distribution problems, I'm scrapping this project. I'll build something else on a similar chassis and repurpose the controllers.

Lessons learned:

• Supergluing sensors worked well - while they worked. When things went wrong, it made it extremely difficult to fix.
• Power distribution is the main problem: splitting power to Vmax, 3V3, and 5V.
• The sensors are really sensitive to voltage.

So it looks like these are *really* sensitive to voltage: anything over 5V causes them to die.

Scooter has a 6V power supply, which is the likely culprit for this.

It's a problem I've had with other things, so I've started designing a power distribution board based on LM-series voltage regulators; I want to be able to support much voltages than 6V, for example 6-AA packs (9V).

So, I dug up two more HC-SR04’s and tried them on the robot... they started working, and then died. I’m guessing it’s kickback or something from the motors. I’ll maybe need to build a distribution board to take care of this or set up a separate rail.

Also need to buy more sensors... good thing they’re cheap.

Well, it looks like I’ve got a pair of bad sensors. I verified it against a test sketch, and so that’s that. It’ll be a bit of pain to replace them because they’re superglued on, but I’ll figure something out.

I've been getting sensor output like

C: -1.00
L: -1.00
R: 120.38
C: -1.00
L: -1.00
R: 122.97

(C is the centre sensor, L is the left sensor, and R is the right sensor).

I wonder if it's bad sensors or what.

Also, had to vendor the SparkFun SCMD library due to an I2C init issue - the upstream tries to start in slave mode.

I have another project that's a more heavyweight robot, so I decided to build a lightweight one to experiment with some things.

I took a cheap 2WD chassis I found online, superglued some HC-SR04's I had lying around onto it, and somehow got a controller and motor controller hooked up. I wanted to use some of my Adafruit feathers, but my boards seem to be misbehaving so I just grabbed the Turbo I had lying around to use.

All of my boards have this weird thing where they only take power via USB or a LiPo battery pack JST connector, so I guess now my robot has two sets of batteries: one connected to the controller, the other supplying 5V to everything else.

It sort of works. More on that later.