Sunday, December 8

Last week, Angelo and myself got together to work on some Arduino problems that we were encountering.  The new motors that we got require more power than the 5V that the Arduino board supplies, so we needed to set up an H-bridge so that we would be able to power the motors using a 9V battery instead.  We needed to Google how to setup an H-bridge because we were unsure as to which pins did what, and we found a pretty good picture that tells which pins go where on the H-bridge.  This picture can be found at http://dtostillwell.com/?p=251.  After setting it up we tested it on smaller motors and it worked well. The onlyy problem that we faced was that the H-bridge requires a lot of wires and the jumpers that we use are too long.  It creates a mess on the breadboard, as you can see in the following picture.

The IR sensor on the breadboard was being blocked by these wires which made it very difficult to control everything with the remote.  Because of this we are thinking of cutting some of the wires smaller or just separating the H-bridge and the IR and RGB onto two separate breadboards.

 Luckily we do not have to change our code from the one previously written because the H-bridge still allows the motors to be run using "digitalWrite" commands.

We also received our car frame that was laser cut using 1/8 inch plastic.  It came out really well and all of our bolts can fit into the holes nicely.

We are still waiting for our motor brackets which we should be able to pick up from the lab tomorrow.  We attempted to make the car Wednesday using zip-ties instead of the brackets however every time the direction changed on the motors, they slipped and would not stay straight.  Once we have the motors, we will post a picture of the finished car and a video of it driving with the remote.

It took about an hour to get the H-bridge working for both motors and about 1.5 hours to make the car on Wednesday.