Pretty well everything is ready now to put together Decimus 4 - my latest micromouse. The last part to be done was the wheels. While I had the materials and the tools to make these, I certainly didn't have the time so I thought I might as well try having…
When your STM32 processor starts up from a reset, there are a number of possible sources for that reset. You may want to perform different initialisations depending on the exact source of the reset. A single register holds the flags which tell you why the processor was reset. It is…
It didn't take long to get the first Decimus 4 board on the bench for a build. This first one will serve as a static testbed for code development and sensor testing. After verifying that the power supplies were good, the LEDs, display, buzzer and pushbuttons were added for a…
Here in the UK, we use metric fasteners. When you go shopping for small screws though, the only sizes you can generally get below M3 are old, awkward imperial sizes. Even if you are happy with M3, the variety of shapes and lengths is woefully inadequate. Imagine my delight when I found perfect screws on Amazon of all places. (more…)
When I applied power to the motors on Zeetah VI (ZVI) for the first time, the motors seemed to struggle and the PWM value to get the wheels to rotate seemed higher than usual. Since this was my first four wheel mouse of this configuration (ZIV is a four wheel drive, four wheel steer mouse), I wasn’t sure if the higher load was normal or not.
Analog Devices recently release new vibration rejection gyros which seemed a perfect fit for use on a micromouse. Since I was using the ADXRS610 on Zeetah V, I temporarily mounted an ADXRS642 to ZV to compare the two.
Finally, a way to solder the Analog Devices ADXRS610 gyro… The last time we attached a gyro, we overheated the board and the board delaminated. This time, we use a skillet and avoided that problem.
Once the panels for the maze floor had dried out, it was time to paint them.
(more…)
Now that I had the layout, the next step was to cut and drill the plywood.
While there are many techniques for doing this, I ended up getting help from a friend who has access to water jet cutters to do this.
Given standard sizes for plywood, here is a pattern I used to make a maze floor. (more…)