Man Is A Robot

So I got the second version of my main board, the one with the increased motor traces, back last week sometime. I finally did solder most of it up and, initially, found only a couple of minor issues. One was that my screw terminals for my motor wires did not fit. Which is frustrating since that footprint was also wrong in my initial version. Now instead of two close together the pin holes are too far apart. Anyway, not a big deal as I can just solder the wires onto the board directly. The sonar module in the front of the tank (right side of the above image) was just hot-glued into some crude cut-outs and ended up pointing slightly downward such that it was reflecting against the ground. The led strip is just thrown into the tank (This strip comes with the tank and has a mounting position on the top chassis. I wanted it in my tank for debugging purposes: I am able to light two of the LEDs and give some visual feedback as to what is going on with the microcontroller...

Over the weekend, I updated the turret-board design and put in a new order to OSHPark. There was a lot of trial-and-error and aggravation, trying to figure out why my bread-board version of the Pixart camera was working, while my revision 3, with bodge wires added, still did NOT work. Turns out that I needed my oscillator to share a ground with the Arduino. This is still a weird kind of mystery to me and another one of those times when I wish I had a firmer grasp of the underlying theory. [Edit: Circuits need a common ground! This Stack Exchange explains it okay.] After I figured out the oscillator situation, the camera seemed to work fine. It would occasionally stop working but I think that this was just due to bad connections. It would be nice to have a reset capability. Just having the ability for the microcontroller to shut on and off the power to the turret would be sufficient. This would only require the addition of a transistor to the main board. But it would require one mor...

I spent the last two evenings updating the Main Board schematic and PCB layout. I deleted all the labels and manually placed wires for every connection. But this caused problems: I could no longer see helpful net information as I laid-out my circuit, it wasn't easy to tie thermal features into a ground-plane (since my ground plane was now some randomly-labeled net), and the schematic was basically unreadable. So, then, after laying out the circuit board, I decided to double-back and I added back all the labels into my schematic. I'm still not sure whether it was my net-labeling that led to the screwed-up boards from before. I manually checked the laid-out board for missing connections until my eyes were bleeding but didn't find anything. I tried several different methods for adding thermal-relief vias but the method that is well-described in  this video  is what I ended-up using. There doesn't seem to be a settled method in KiCAD for adding thermal vias, so googling a...

At roughly the same time a couple of weeks ago, I received my turret board and main boards back from OSHPark. I was busy with other stuff but finally did solder my main board up with a voltage regulator and DIP sockets for the microcontroller and motor controllers. It took me quite some time and I had to bodge the reset line but finally I did get my FTDI board to program the chip sitting on my PCB and make a light blink. This was a first for me, programming a standalone ATMega328, and it felt pretty great. Mistakes made here were: the capacitor on the reset line was too small (I had better luck with a 1uF cap), the resistor on the reset line was inline instead of a pull-up (I keep doing that!), and a jumper was required to make my FTDI work at 5V (I had thought that the jumper was optional, for selecting 3V. This explains why I had never before been able to program anything with my FTDI board. Doh.) After that success, I pretty quickly figured-out that my motor controllers had no p...