But first, the soldering. Using my soldering iron, I attached what are called solid wires to my motors' wires, which are stranded wires.Basically, stranded wire is a bunch of very thin copper wires. Solid wire consists of those stranded wires all dipped in a pot of tin, so that they merge together into a single wire. The advantage of this is easily demonstrated. Stranded wire, because it consists of a mess of different wires, isn't easily placed into a breadboard (which is just a bunch of holes, some of which are connected to each other). Solid wire can be easily placed into a breadboard providing a solid connection.
|Stranded Wire||Solid Wire|
|Wire in breadboard||Better wire in breadboard|
I have ordered what I hope is my last shipment of components. This includes a "shield" for the Arduino, which is just a board that goes above the main board. This shield will allow me to place my breadboard just above the microcontroller, allowing me to save space. I also ordered a motor driver, even though I had hoped I wouldn't need one. The reason behind the motor driver is because a motor's speed and direction is influenced by the amount of current passed into it. With the motor driver, I can use input from the Arduino to influence that speed and direction of two motors, allowing me to turn the wheels left and right and to slow the car down before it hits a wall. The input to the motor driver is what is called Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM), which works by alternating HIGH (5v) and LOW (0v) signals at a certain frequency. This is nice, because I just need to call one command from the Arduino [analogWrite(value)], and it will send that signal until I tell it to stop (I will go more in depth on my programming and code at a later point), so from a coding standpoint it is extremely easy to control my motors. Hopefully, by the end of next week, my car will be able to drive itself!
I end this week heading off to the RoboGames. This is a convention held in San Mateo, CA and it is all about robots. There is one event in particular which I am interested in: the Robomagellan. This event is about autonomous robots navigating an obstacle course, which is quite similar to what I hope to accomplish. Other events include a Humanoid robot basketball tournament and autonomous robot fights. I will be taking video and pictures and if I get a chance talking to some of the robot creators in an attempt to learn any thing that might be interesting or help me in this project.
'Til next time!
Next: RoboGames 2011