Travelling to contests is great. Except for the bits and pieces that you need to lug around. For several years I have used a smart charger for my LiPo batteries. It is a fine charger but bulky. Along with its mains power supply it is about the size of a large laptop charger and needs several cables to join together. I decided to make a smaller, portable charging solution. (more…)
The sensors are a critical part of a micromouse. Primus uses six infra-red reflective sensors. Here is code to test that they are working.Now that we have a nice display to show what the sensor reading are, we can get that module tested. Since the hardware is very simple, there is not a lot to go wrong. Yet somehow I had a dead sensor when I first tested the Primus prototype. It was a simple dry joint that would have been detected by more careful inspection of the board. (more…)