Robotics Guy's Blog

This board was designed for use as a general prototyping board, as I needed something a little more robust then my previous one. The main reason for building this, was that I needed a serial connection to a PC for debugging. It's hard to learn ADC's, Timers, PWM etc. without...

My first L297-298 stepper motor controller was made on prototyping board, which turned out to be a nightmare for two reasons. One, it's really hard to keep track of all the wires and where they're supposed to go when you're trying to assemble the board. Two, I meticulously made the wires all the "right" lengths because I wanted the stepper motor...

I designed this board to be a general-purpose experimentation board to help me learn about the PIC184550 USB module (or SIE). This was meant to be a kind of "step up" from my dsPIC30f4011 board which uses an RS-232 serial interface for communication with a PC. I really wanted to move from using RS-232 to USB, as USB is the new standard these days...

A cheap & easy to build CNC Machine for drilling PCBs

After etching my first Printed Circuit Board (PCB), it immediately became clear that drilling the holes was going to be a problem. Not only are there a lot of holes in most PCBs, but the drill bits are so small that any horizontal movement results in the bit breaking....

I finally finished my first SMT PCB, which I’ve been working on for a while. It was designed to be a general purpose board for a PIC18f4550 microcontroller. It has mostly 0805 parts on it, with the microcontroller being a TQFP package. Here are some pictures:


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My latest project has been integrating my newly created electronics board with the frame I built using parts from a Vex Robotics kit. I’ve also finished writing both the software on the PIC microcontroller, and the PC program that I wrote for debugging. To make things a...