[img boards.jpg||right]I've been working on modifications to my desk the last few days, but I decided to do some more work on the robot yesterday. I ended up making 3 boards complete with parts. I haven't tested the boards yet, which is on today's agenda. One board is the DIP switch and USB port board, which will be mounted on the underside of the car. Then there's the main PIC board, which will read the signals from the receiver and transmit the information to the arduino via SPI. The last board is for another robotics project I'm starting on the side.

I decided to remake the insides of the servo I took apart for this robot and got some PIC12F683 chips as SMT (so I could fit it in the servo). I'm trying to make a simple circuit that will read the PWM codes (that part should be easy) and adjust the motor with an H-Bridge circuit and read the position with the built-in 5k potentiometer using one of the chip's A/D converters. One reason I chose this chip (besides the small footprint) is that it can use an internal oscillator like the PIC18F2620 I'm using on the main board, so that's less components. I'm planning on doing the entire thing with SMT components and most likely a 2-sided circuit board so it takes up as little room as possible. I came up with a great way to do vias on 2 sided home made boards as a hobbiest, which is to basically take a wire and solder it on both sides of the board and trim it as flat as possible. The same thing can be done with soldering component leads on both sides for throughhole parts. Anyhow, the third board is just to allow me to use the SMT component on a breadboard for a circuit. I'm still unsure at this point how I'm going to program the chip, since putting in an ICSP header would make the circuit much larger, unless I can find a small 5-6 pin connector for that purpose. I still have a bunch of modifications to do to the car such as mounting the circuit boards, shortening the wiring harness between the boards and stuff like that.