Today I set aside 5 of the cases to try different ways of getting a nice gold finish on the plastic. The first way that I tried was to use gold leaf. It looks really good but is a son of a borg to work with. The second method that I'm going to try is gold paint, based on my experience brushing the adhesive onto the plastic this should work great, however the craft store I had visited did not have any and I wasn't able to go else where today because I have important Muribot things to get done.

Not much new is happening other than just prep work. So I'd like to talk about the MCU that the Muribot uses, and why I chose this particular microprocessor.

Muribot uses a PIC18F46J50 in a 44-pin TQFP package. It is capable of running at 64Mhz but to use the USB functionality the maximum clock speed is restricted to 48Mhz so that is what Muribots clock source. I chose a Microchip microprocessor over potentially more powerful alternative such as Arduino for two reasons A) because I think the challenges of working in those environments are something that kids should learn and B) A lot of people interested in robotic platforms enjoy the thrill of working in that kind of environment.

A particular challenge that was personally enjoyable for myself was mapping the 44 pins to the i/o functions used throughout Muribot. 82% of the pins are used which leaves a little room to add features for stretch goals during the kickstarter. 18% of the pins are responsible for driving the H-Bridge alone, something that in the next generation I plan to remedy by creating a dedicated motor control module that is present on the I2C bus; however in this design the complexity of another microprocessor just wasn't necessary.

I've also been asked why I only choose to integrate the Muribot API into MPLab rather than trying to also offer a more kid friendly solution. If you'll let me tell a story, I remember being about 7-8 years old and going through a whole book of C tutorials. I believe the drive that I demonstrated then translated to the drive I demonstrate now by designing and producing Muribot. I want to foster that kind of thinking and behavior because I think it has served me very well as an Adult. It is also why we offer the Muribot API in the first place, to work as a stepping stone into the full C (and eventually C++) language without hiding it behind a entirely graphical interface.

Another reason I chose a Microchip processor is because of the fact that at it's core, it's programmed in an assembly language variant that has a very terse instruction set. It is backwards compatible to an extent, and should be almost entirely forward compatible, meaning if I create other robots with a Microchip processor it should be rather simple to port the Muribot API over, and then you would simply open your project, change the library reference from Muribot to Felibot in your project and recompile.

You should be able to see why I like that idea, I want to make it so that you'll be able to run code you created to run on Muribot on my future platforms, if possible. This is one of the powerful features of C/C++ and I want to make full use of it if possible to simplify your experience with my product.

Anyways, I think that's enough for this update. Before I go I'd like to answer an ongoing question I keep getting asked…why "Muribot". Well if you read my really early posts when this project was known as MINI Mouse I decided I wanted a more marketable name, and one that possibly wouldn't garner me the wrath of a certain animation company. I had a mouse pet at the time and with him being a House Mouse, I took his scientific family name, Muridae and contracted it with Robot arriving at Muribot. Not very exciting I'm sure, but I liked it much better.

Stay tuned tomorrow for some pictures of some golden Muribots!