Some pictures (nothing more, atm).

I’ve been working on a new robot of late, taking the controller and parts from the older one and placing them into a new chassis and system. Lacking time to work on a new h-bridge circuit, I’m actually using an Ardomoto shield from SparkFun, which takes care of most of the wiring for me, and also uses a more powerful L298 h-bridge. If you look carefully, you’ll see one of my breadboard Arduinos in there, it’s currently only there to interpret the Nunchuk readings and to control the RGB LEDs in front. In the future, it’ll be used for the PID control, which I have yet to implement. It’s connected to the main Arduino Mega clone with I2C, running at 100KHz.

Some pictures:

I’ve burnt out a few Arduinos recently, and have found it expedient to just build my own on a breadboard rather than pay $34.95 and buy an Arduino Duemilanove online. It’s cheaper ($7.40, without FTDI or breadboard, SparkFun), and easy to fix if something goes wrong. Note that this tutorial does NOT include a voltage regulator, power will come from the FTDI board.

Parts List (minimum, of course):

• 170 tie point breadboard ($3.95)
• ATMega328P w/ Arduino Bootloader ($5.50)
• 16mhz resonator ($0.95)
• 10 kOhm resistor ($0.25)
• 100uF Capacitor ($0.35)
• SparkFun 5v FTDI Breakout ($14.95)
• Assorted wires ($0.00, you can pull them from anything)
• [optional] LED, for pin 13. ($0.35)

All prices are from SparkFun, which is NOT the cheapest. Note that the capacitor and the SparkFun FTDI can be reused across many boards, and thus the costs is divided among all the boards you build.

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.