My Arduino managed to kill itself somehow… sadly. I’ll work out replacements later.

I finished up the PCB today, and it doesn’t work properly… can’t tell what’s wrong with the connections =(.

BUT

I made another one =)

It’s much cleaner than the original, and it WORKS. I’ll be putting it into testing later… the socket is a ZIF (zero insertion force) socket, so I can easily remove the ATMega328 for programming.

I was thinking a few days ago to make my robot platform standalone, and not dependent on the Arduino Duemilanove. As the Arduino is quite expensive, but its assorted parts are not (An ATMega328 and a ceramic resonator total to about $7.00), I decided to make a so-called ‘standalone Arduino’. Since this board is designed to be a slave to the Arduino, and not to be removed from the robot, it will be designed with a ZIF 28-pin DIP socket (for programming), and have only 5 pins to connect to the Arduino (Vbatt, Vcc, Vss, sclk, sdata). Communication will be done via the I2C interface.

As I don’t possess the ZIF socket or some other important parts yet, the board is currently incomplete. The soldering is quite messy, unfortunately, as a result of a bad iron and really fat solder. Also a lot of it is jury-rigged, since the pre-drilled PCB doesn’t have Vcc and Vss rails.