Post #6: Completing the bottom deck

Progress!  Finally seeing the light at the end of this very long tunnel.  I've got the middle layer complete, everything mounted and wired.  I even tested each of the modules to make sure things are still working.

Where I got to on Wednesday

I started out where I left off on Tuesday. In this picture on the left, you can see that I was able to drill/tap the holes for the power conditioner board.  I also remounted the motors, side and back panels pulling the wires out of the way.   The front panel, when mounted is really tight to get wires installed, so I left it off for now, it is laying at the front of the bot.

4 squares of 2 sided tape

tie wrap, anchor, existing holes

The battery wasn't as hard to mount as I thought.  I just put 4 little squares of 2 sided tape on the corners and a tie wrap anchor on the top, then ran a long tie wrap through existing holes in the platform.

These next two pics show the final state of the lower level.  I took a pencil and wrapped the wires around it to give me plenty of length to move them around if I need to.  Also, look at all the extra space for a bigger battery down the road, plus, the wires are long enough to reach the terminals on whatever battery we eventually put in there.  Also, having the wiring looped around lets me remove side panels if I need to with enough wiring to give me room to do what I need to.

The front panel is really crowded and I didn't have a good premade cable to plug into the 6 necessary pins on the motor controller (ENA, IN1, IN2, IN3, IN4, ENB).  So I picked different color jumper wires and thread them through some shrink wrap to keep them all together.  To remember which wire is on which pin, I used the resistor color code pattern (rainbow). "ROYGBIV", so my wiring colors from left to right are Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue then White.  Easy way to remember which is on which pin when I go wire this thing up to the Arduino.

One more little thing I did, on the DC to DC converter, just to make sure my adjusting resistor doesn't move around by accident, I put a little dollup of  silicon on it, when it dries it should prevent it from moving.  Checking to make sure it stays at 7.2 volts, it was around 7.18, so tuned it up a bit.

Put the fuses in, turned on switches, checked voltages, all looks good.  This weekend, the top level and the fun stuff, the Arduino, Compass, Bluetooth and of course the PIXY!

Soon I'll be writing about the software, what I'm better at than manufacturing :).

Stay tuned.