[img car_all_boards.jpg||right]I've been quite busy the past couple days. I finished making the wiring harnesses, I ended up making another board that sits on top of the arduino, I had to do a little reshaping of the inside of the car, I mounted the Ping sensor, and I updated the code. The board that sits on the arduino is quite nice, since it organizes connections and distributes power very nicely. I can plug my servos and sensors directly into it that way. I also added a connector for an MMC card for the future with enough pins for SPI communication and one of the pins to notify the arduino if a card was inserted. That left 8 digital I/O pins (3 of them are currently being used by the servos and sensor) and 6 analog pins.

After I finished making the wiring harnesses, I realized that the top of the inside compartment wasn't fitting on so easily because I had used slightly heavier gauge wire than the servos had, so I ended up having to do a little reshaping to the plastic inside the compartment including removing the velco off the receiver in order to allow enough room. I also ended up widening the hole that the wires come out of and after that it ended up fitting well enough.

I didn't want the Ping sensor just sitting on the front, so I made a bracket out of a computer case blank and a couple of spacers out of some wall anchors which took me about 20 minutes and screwed it onto the front of the car. I ended up mounting it vertically, not only because it worked better that way, but the other way looked a lot like eyes which was kind of creepy.

With the new board I needed to switch one of the servos to a different pin, so I went ahead and changed the pin number in the code and uploaded it to the board and afterwards the ESC stopped responding to the remote. I guess I must have experimented with the code after the previous upload, so I went ahead and fixed the problem and actually got the code working exactly how I wanted it to. Also, The Arduino team had updated their software to version 0020 (I had 0018), which I downloaded and installed last night. However they had updated the SPI library, so I ended up making a number of code changes this morning to reflect the new library and tested it successfully.

I was looking up information about the accelerometer I had (the LIS3L06AL, which is now considered obsolete) to see what kind of interface it had. It looks like I had decided to go with analog outputs, so I should just be able to hook that up to the analog inputs and be good to go. All I have left to do really is mount the USB board on the underside, route the wiring harness, and drill a couple holes and everything should be done short of adding more sensors and updating the code, which is more of a longterm learning project anyhow.

And finally, I realized I still haven't named this robot yet, so I'm thinking about that. This is kind of a general purpose robotics platform that is fairly easy to change, test, and update for whichever task I want to accomplish, so I will probably be taking that into account when I figure out a name.