Writing your own upgraded servo library in C++ is probably going to be the easiest route. Just call it the ‘Botboarduino Servo Library’ or something along those lines. Adding additional libraries is actually really easy and well within most Arduino users capabilities.
It’s going to take a little longer than I thought to get on the same page. I will have to have another go at it.
I intended this to be a technical thread to discuss the details of the Bot Boarduino. I assumed Andy would have many options, and that he would want to bounce ideas off us. But it looks like he has a handle on it and needs no input. 
I’m shying away from any more Jim vs. Dale comments. Suffice it to say, I will continue to support Basic Micro as long as they continue to support Lynxmotion. I do plan to do more with the open source electronics agenda to enhance the mechanics we have. Will see what happens.
Oh I’ll need input! I’m just rocking and rolling along so far because I’m sticking largely to the arduino reference design schematic, not a lot of room for customization. In fact, before I pull the trigger on the prototypes I’ll post up the gerber layouts to get feedback on it before we spend money on the first batch. I’m sure we’ll need to make some changes before going into production as well.
Pictures or Boards? 8)
I want I want I want 
. What is the status of the shield?
Kurt
The boards are going to be getting made pretty quick I hear. I will let you know when I have hardware.
Have you guys seen that Arduino just came out with new versions? I noticed it up in this posting.
societyofrobots.com/robotfor … icseen#new
Kurt
No performance boost, just a different USB circuit. Hmm… 
Here is a new maybe board that supports something like 48 servos. Probably the wrong form factor: letsmakerobots.com/node/25923
Never Mind, Design has issues:
Here you go…
Here are the Eagle files. Requires version 4.6 though. I will get the update for my 4.11 version if needed.
BotBoarduino.brd (37.6 KB)
BotBoarduino.sch (64.2 KB)
Taking a quick look through this, I wonder about how well it would work. As far as I can tell, All of the power connectors on this shield go to the regulated +5V which would probably not allow you to run very many servos or the like. I would as a minimum have hoped that all of the Analog pins go to regulated +5v and all digital go to VIN. And if the main board has the same voltage regulator as the Seeeduino Mega maybe it should have it’s own power connector, with a jumper to connect to VIN.
Other than adding 3 pin connectors for most of the IO lines it added 3 buttons and 3 led and no sound or the like.
It’s going to need some tweaking. Power selector jumpers for at least some of the I/O is a must.
Hi Jim (and others)
I know that it is probably better to come up with a one board solution, but I do think I have a shield that would work with current design and with Seeeduino Megas.
I think it has a reasonable number of Analog(8) and Digital pins(20) that are broken out. It has it’s own power bus, where you can choose between it or +5v from main board. 3 buttons and LEDS that are independent, plus speaker. There are 4 pins with 2 pull-ups for PS2, plus power next to it… Still Need to do a little more updates to markings to show which pins are connected to LEDS/Switches.
Also if I go any farther, would help to have feedback, like should I put different pads in for switches? It looks like Mike did on BB2 and likewise Arc32.
EDIT: Updated image, also if I go any farther need to verify my holes for the Arduino Mega are exactly in the same place on the board. That is I may have shifted all of them down slightly to leave more room for text, but would cause the mounting holes to not totally align. Will verify.
EDIT2: I may not need pull-down resistors I added for the 3 switches. Could instead simply wire to switch and have other side of switch to ground and enable built-in pull-up resistor. I think that is Andrew did earlier… But I think I still need resistors for LEDS. I don’t think his design had them?
EDIT3: I removed the pull-down resistors to the switches. I also believe I now have all of the Connectors that plug into the Arduino Mega board properly aligned. It passes both my verifications with diptrace layout as well as Viewmates, only warnings are on silk trace.
Kurt
Botboarduino Mega Shield.zip (313 KB)
That looks a lot better…
With my decision to be vocal about the Basic Micro saga I had Andy opted out of this section. So anyway he won’t be seeing this stuff. I really thought he was giving me a working board… But I guess not.
I can’t comment on the changes to the LED’s and pushbuttons without a schematic. lol The hardware serial ports could be joined more closely like the servo outputs.
This will work with another off the shelf mega? We should maybe get some for testing purposes? Maybe I can sell the one you mentioned for the interim? Thanks for your work on this!
My PDF does have schematic in it, including a PDF file print… As I mentioned, I removed the resistors from the buttons, as we can simply use the built-in pull-up resistors on those pins. Then in your sketch to initialize one for a button like pin 51 you would simply need to do:
digitalWrite(51,HIGH);
pinMode(51,INPUT);
To read the buttons you could either simply use the digitalRead command or you could set up a pin change interrupt…
As for LEDS, it looked like Andy just connected them directly to the IO ports, which did not feel right. I left in 390 resistors on the LEDS, which I believe is the same as BB2…
Yes, this shield is geared around the Seeeduino Mega board by Seeed Studio and NKC Electronics, so it should work on them. The mounting holes are obviously different. As I mentioned, I thought about making a few for myself to see if they work. Yesterday I was playing around with the Eagle design files for these boards. I have used the conversion programs to get them into DIPTRACE, but so far I have made a mess of it. I am trying to see just how hard it would be to make the minimal changes to have the same mounting holes and probably move the reset switch down.
Yep, I can make them closer to each other no problem.
The other questions to myself or others…
-
Should there be a larger capacitor hooked up near the VServo input to smooth things out. Something like:
399-3706-1-ND CC1210 Kemit CAPACITOR TANT 10UF 16V 10% SMD -
Should there be some power LED on the board. If so what type of resistor should be hooked up as voltage could be 12+V???
-
+5v? The Seeeduino Mega Vcc can be switched from +5V to +3.3v. Currently the shield only uses the +5V or VServo for IO pins. If I understand correctly the voltage regulators on the S…Mega has a larger 5v regulator that feeds into a smaller (800ma) 3.3v regulator. I verified with mine, that regardless of what the Vcc the 5V is 5V and the 3.3V is 3.3V. The question is if the user switches the logic to 3.3V should there be some option to change the voltage pins to 3.3V? For me not big issue.
Kurt
Update:
I moved the Serial connections around. Another question I have had, is should I make use of the Top of the board for another ground pour. I experimented with adding it and it now looks like:
Top:
Bottom:
Kurt
I played around a little more with it. I added male header pins for Analog pins 8-15 although I did not add Power or ground for them. I put in space for capacitor near power input, if I don’t need it, we don’t need to populate it. Decided not to add LED for now… I may run with this for myself and see if it works…
Kurt
I was hoping Mike would chime in. I don’t think the cap is going to be required as a battery is the best capacitor there is, lol You might want to spread the bush buttons out a little. It looks like there is room to do so.
So this mounted on top of a CH3-R for example. It’s my understanding that the arduino mega board could mount from the bottom and it will work. It doesn’t need to be our mega board. Right? In fact any normal Arduino board could mount to this too. Just fewer I/O’s available?
Hi Jim and others,
OK, I removed the cap, moved the buttons to be .3" apart instead of .2", found that Andrew had added a set of I2C Male pins which I did not have, so added that. Now it looks like:
Bottom looks like:
As to could this shield be used with Non-Mega boards, the answer is maybe, that is if this is fully populated you are going to have a lot of extended connector pins hanging down that may hit something. Of course we could always have a minimally populated version as well. That is you don’t populate all of the connectors that are beyond A0-5 and D0-13 (this is both the Male and Female sets). Likewise only have USART0.
Gone is PS2, I2C. Not sure about Buttons, LEDS, or Speaker, couple of different options:
a) Punt and not populate those either. Makes a cheap board, that just gives you the 20 IO pins plus power bus
b) Add jumper(s) for some or all of these.
b1) just a simple jumper that the user can make their own connections to with any wire.
b2) Pick some default ones and use shunts to enable (user could still choose own like today with BB2… remove shunt and jumper)
Suggestions?
Kurt
P.S - Viewmate complained a little about the board being swiss cheese with more than 40 drills per square inch…