More Rover 5 building

Got some new parts today from Robonor: (ty for quick shipping!)

* 9V to barrel adapters
* Breadboard buttons
* 10 and 50mm standoffs
* Breadboard cables
* Breadboard

Now I can mount both my Uno and Mega with separate breadboards on the Rover 5, and power them both from 9V, as well as having the built-in separate battery pack for the Rover. With two breadboards, I can now add more buttons and sensors too :)

The previous version of my Rover OS used a potmeter for menu selection, so this will make it a lot easier.

Now I just need to wait for some supplies from Robosavvy in the UK....

1 x IR compound eye 

1 x Dagu - 4 Channel DC Motor Controller with Encoder Support 

2 x SparkFun - Optical Detector / Phototransistor - QRD1114

....which should be here in around 2 weeks or so :) Then the Rover will actually be able to run!

Mean while, I have a ton of literally screwing around to do to get the optimal design and layout.

Arduino robot project

10/10/12

With the helpful guys at Robonor.no, I've ordered the following parts for my project:

Arrived in the mail today, UNO R3 from Robonor

• Sparkfun Inventor's Kit for Arduino
• Arduino Beginner Tool Kit Robonor (Soldering kit)
• Digital Multimeter Electrical Meter DT 9205A
• Battery pack - 4xAA
• Serial Enabled 16x2 LCD - Black on Green 5V

Dagu 4 motor controller is on it's way from England!

I will eventually get the Rover5 4-engined robot, but as the Dagu controller card is hard to get, I have to put this on hold for a while. At the moment, I will have enough to do by going trough the basics! When the Rover is in place, I will get an Mega ADK board for my Android phone to utilize all the sensors.



I have ordered the Dagu controller from the UK along with an IR compund eye from RoboSavvy. I'll slip right under the 20 pound tax limit! This could take a cool 2 months 4 weeks though. (Seems he could speed it up a bit!?

Meanwhile,I'll get to program the Arduino controller and hooking up the LCD display.
Fun times!

Serial Enabled 16x2 LCD - Black on Green 5V

11/10/12

Got an old laptop from a friend for fixing his new one and installing games and a 'safe' browsing environment. Not too bad either, Dual core AMD Turion with 2 gigs and 256 mb shared gfx memory. Will probably install XP in this to use all the easily available Arduino tools, and run Linux in a VM to run electronics software.

Postal service reports that the package has been received and will probably end up here tomorrow afternoon :)

13/10/12

Picked up package today, everything was included as far as I can tell, except the 3-pin serial LCD, but i actually got a much better LCD with a mounted backpack, so this should be a serious upgrade! Thanks Robonor! Quick delivery too!

Graphic LCD Serial Backpack

Serial Graphic LCD 128x64

First testing footage

From the Circ-02 tutorial with 8 leds

Well, cannot complain, everything worked as expected!

14/10/12

Some connectors was badly soldered from the factory. Fixed that and now it should work. Pixels was all over the screen.

Some error in the manual it seems. It won't work from the 5.5v line, have to use Vin. Here you can see the Sparkfun icon!

Some software I probably need:
http://www.atmel.com/tools/AVR32STUDIO2_6.aspx