Changes and Additions

Obsolete

Well isn’t that always the way, you use a perfectly good part and the company that makes it decides to obsolete the part. The Panasonic PNA4602M has been discontinued so I am searching for a suitable replacement. You can still get the part from different hobby electronic outlets. Parallax is still selling them along with Hobby Engineering and Adafruit Industries. Right now it is looking like the Vishay TSOP34838 is a possible replacement. It has the same pin out as the Panasonic part with lower current requirements. That is a good thing. I am just trying to understand the data sheet as how to work with the part. I wonder if it will have the same issue as the Sharp GP1UX series that I talked about in my last post.

Ring Sensor

I forgot to mention the sensors that detect the edge of the sumo ring. In mini sumo the edge of the ring has a white line around it, while the rest of the ring is black. Most mini sumo robots use IR reflector sensors to detect this white edge to know if they are about to drive out of the ring.  Pololu makes a nice series of sensors they call the QTR sensor. This is the sensor I plan to use as they are inexpensive and easy to get. If I made a circuit board and bought the components to populate the PCBs, it would cost way more than just purchasing the sensors. I forgot these because they are not mounted on the main board, but attach to the front under body of the robot. The board will have headers on it to connect to the QTR sensors.

Related Articles

• Final Design Ideas (astram8179.wordpress.com)

Project Ideas

So some of the electronic project ideas I have had are:

1. New brain and motor driver board for my Mini Sumo robot
2. SD card interface to an AVR microcontroller
3. A DDS Function Generator that can go up to 10MHz
4. A vision system based off of an Analog Devices Blackfin 531/32/33 DSP
5. A robot brain for a Hexapod robot
6. Finally, a CPLD/FPGA experimenter board

I know some of my ideas are robotics related, but as you notice not all of them are. The function generator is just a piece of test equipment I want to build, where as the CPLD/FPGA experimenter’s board is just so I can play around with those devices.

The first thing I am going to be working on is my new brain for my mini sumo ‘bot. The current plan is to use an Atmel mega328 (compatible with Arduino) as the main controller, and maybe add a second controller that only handles the IR object detectors and reports back to the ‘328. Then I need to pick a motor driver chip, and decide if I want to use surface mount or through hole parts. If I go surface mount and other people like my design, they might not be able to build it. If I use all through hole, anyone could build it. I could even go as far as to make it a kit. Then again a surface mount board just looks high-tech and has that “Cool!” or “Wow!” factor. This is something I will have to think about.

Well I just want this to be a quick post, so I am ending it here.