Nathan's Blog

Last semester my robotic's club's goal was to build small robots that could navigate through mazes. I was able to complete the challenge, but I just realized I never posted about it on here!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLwJEyHSLCY

The Arduino code is available for download here: Arduino maze solving robot code

This board was designed for use as a general prototyping board, as I needed something a little more robust then my previous one. The main reason for building this was that I needed a serial connection to a PC for debugging. It's hard to learn ADC's, Timers, PWM etc....

My first L297-298 stepper motor controller was made on prototyping board, which turned out to be a nightmare for two reasons:
It's really hard to keep track of all the wires and where they're supposed to go when you're trying to assemble the board.
I meticulously cut all the wires to the "right" lengths and bent them at right angles because I wanted the s...

I designed this board to be a general-purpose experimentation board to help me learn about the PIC184550 USB module (or SIE). This was meant to be a kind of "step up" from my dsPIC30f4011 board which uses an RS-232 serial interface for communication with a PC. I really wanted to move from using RS-232 to USB, as USB is the new standard these days...

A cheap & easy to build CNC Machine for drilling PCBs

After etching my first Printed Circuit Board (PCB), it immediately became clear that drilling the holes was going to be a problem. Not only are there a lot of holes in most PCBs, but the drill bits are so small that any horizontal movement results in the bit breaking. Although...

I finally finished my first SMT PCB, which I’ve been working on for a while. It was designed to be a general purpose board for a PIC18f4550 microcontroller. It has mostly 0805 parts on it, with the microcontroller being a TQFP package.

Schematic:

http://www.foxytroni...ery_1_3_620.png


PCB:

http://www.foxytronics.com/u...

My latest project has been integrating my newly created electronics board with the frame I built using parts from a Vex Robotics kit. I’ve also finished writing both the software on the PIC microcontroller, and the PC program that I wrote for debugging. To make things a little...