January 31, 2010 – 4:18 pm
The latest hardware revision includes the upgrades I mentioned in the previous post: there’s a compound eye IR board (above) replacing the sharp rangefinder;
a laser pointer also mounted on the pan/tilt servo; a
physical switch to make sure that can’t be accidentally operated; and a
voltage regulator to supply it with the required 3.3V. As a result there’s an impressive tangle of jumper wires linking all of those up! It’s possible that my original soldering job on the compound eye was sound and that I was just connecting it wrongly: the “J1″ label on the board is actually next to pin 8 rather than pin 1. I’ve also had to glue the omniwheels onto the hubs as they have a habit of falling off otherwise
Sadly, I’m still unable to perform exact turns- careful choice of parameters for one patch of carpet fails elsewhere in the flat. So I’ll have to stick to obstacle avoidance roaming rather than precision navigation. If only the quadrature encoders were supported…