RBBBs and Pololu SSCs

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

I received the two RBBB’s, 1 FTDI TTL USB cable, and two Pololu Serial Servo Controllers (SSC) I bought a few weeks ago. Since then… I’ve been tinkering with them quite a bunch. I learned an incredible amount too from just a tiny board!

Building up the RBBB wasn’t too hard. At first, I printed off the wrong ‘instructions’ - which mind boggled me a bit until I noticed that they were indeed wrong. Once I had the right instructions printed… it was more simple. I was worried about the polarity of the bigger capacitors. After I had it all finished… I went and looked up the FTDI-USB cable specs. This cable is pretty interesting if you think about it, 1 wire turns into 6 more colourful wires -Gnd, CTS (clear to send), +5V, TX, RX, RTS (request to send). I downloaded the Blink program without any problems… until I wanted to test it. The LED wasn’t blinking! After about 5 minutes of intense thought, I realized that there was no LED on pin 13. That was a stupid mistake!

Another stupid mistake, but this one is funnier, was when I was trying to test the other RBBB.
… I forgot to put the chip into the IC socket. That really made me ‘lol’ for 10 minutes.

Then, I was trying to fit it into the breadboard… lets just say it took a longer than normal time.

When the Pololu SSCs showed up, I was pretty excited! Then when I saw them… they are REALLY tiny! It was a big challenge to solder these without them flying out of my hand. I don’t have a 3rd hand tool to hold it steady, so I would sometimes have to hold the ‘pinchy-things’ with my elbow and hold the solder and soldering iron with my hands. The headers were extremely difficult too…

Getting the Pololu to work with the Arduino is pretty aggrivating. I think I’m almost there, I just have to switch the input to the logic level side as I was using the RS-232 one. I thought that the Arduino used RS-232 on its TX line, but it doesn’t. It uses a non-inverted logic level (er well, that’s at least what I read). Tomorrow I plan on looking up the difference between the two
Here are some pictures… I finally threw the desoldering pump out the window (joking) and bought solder wick. Also finally bought NON-LEAD SOLDER!

Other than playing with these, I’ve been flow-charting A LOT of AI programs, and learning more first-order predicate logic. I really like logic and the probabilities and Bayes and everything!!!!! Also having fun thinking about random and bell curves… More back-dated Stanford blog posts to come (so many photos hahah)!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Arduino LED Testing

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

I received my Arduino starter kit from ladyada.com not too long ago - Oct. 30th to be exact - It’s AWESOME! I really think this will work well. Check out the pics and video below!

This is the Arduino Deicemilia board - the main thing.

The Arduino hooked up with a servo - I was testing it. Works well!

This is the protosheild. It sheilds the Arduino for you, this way nothing should happen to it! It is also easier to create circuits with. I spent an hour or so today soldering it all together (I learned how to solder, YAY!)

And now for the test video!

Hope you like!
As for the programming of the project, it is not going too well. I will have to devise a new plan ASAP. I believe I have to submit the project near the end of December… YIKES! However, I am sure I will get it done!

I have registered for MIT ESP’s Splash 2007, mainly in Computer Science classes. It’s going to be the best weekend EVERR! I really can’t wait. Hopefully they can help out once I tell them about the project.

Adios amigos!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.