ZVI Brackets
Pierre was debating whether to make the brackets and separate axles or make them out of one block.
Zeetah VI PCB assembly
After the PCB order had been submitted I created the BOM and ordered the parts from Mouser for delivery a couple of days before the PCB. I tried hard to reduce the number of different parts. One big change from Zeetah V (ZV) to Zeetah VI (ZVI) was that I changed all parts from 0603 to 0402 except when the power or voltage required the larger part. This made fitting the parts for ZVI easier but also made routing 0.2mm traces with 0.2mm space a little harder. This meant that there were very few ZV parts I could use on ZVI. (more…)
Zeetah VI Mechanical and Electrical design
I missed discussing a couple of items in the last post: How are we going to attach the motor/axle brackets to the board and how do we handle the gap between the hub/gear and the bracket. Our original thought was to reduce mechanical complexity of the bracket, we wanted to support having axles that go between both brackets on the mouse.
Zeetah VI SW and Mechanical design
The problem I now face is the same one that Peter ran into between Decimus 1 and 2 of how to share the code base. When I started ZV, I started from the ZIV code base and that forced me to abstract out some of the low level code. I’m…
Design of a four wheel micromouse – Zeetah VI.APEC 2011 contest
At seven PM, Dave opened the envelope with the maze from Gerardo Molina and like a typical Gerardo design, it was a challenging maze. Gerardo’s mazes have long straightways and they always get my mice.
Preparations for APEC 2011
Historically, it seems preparation for a contest really starts the month before the contest and APEC 2011 was no different.