I think that LMR should have its own series of circuit boards, with the designs open source for all LMR'ians to use. Heres a couple ideas for PCB's:
SN754410 Board
Small Encoder boards
Various control boards for PIC, PICAXE, AVR, Arduino, etc
After finally getting a decent laser printer, i'm able to produce PCB's of excellent quality with traces as small as one hundredth of an inch. There are of course minor flaws but all boards are operationally sound. I am willing to produce PCB's for all LMRians for very, very low prices, and circuit test and a microscope evaluation of the board. I can even solder on any SMD components if needed. I guess what this forum is about, is ideas for PCBs for LMR'ians. I have created a couple boards already that I can post, such as a couple PIC controller boards, a Motor Control board and a Li-Ion battery charger board.
I would suggest a board list of what could be useful in terms of what would be a useful design for LMR, a review group and maybe a test group for testing initial boards. Also design best practices, parts lists so that we can keep the parts semi consistant…
I have a small list of parts that I could post plus some stuff I’ve been looking at ordering.
PCB idea list, please suggest ideas so we may add to it: 1 Amp Motor Driver Arduino Shields PIC/AVR/ARM/Parallax controllers These boards can have the pins broke out for easy interfacing, such as ADC, PWM GPIO grouped to gether.
Standard features on the control boards should feature I2C, RS232, 2x5 headers for the ports to be broken out into, ADC, PWM, switchable voltage supply, such as 3.3v, 5v 12v
It was a single sell Li-ion/Li-Poly with auto detect and everything, powered off of USB or Direct power (5-7V). Single IC, and a capacitor. Oh and the IC (max1555) was the size of the word TINY. Excellent for alot of applications, such as tiny robots.
Thanks for the quick reply, unfortunately all my bots are big boys and the battery packs are rated in multiple AH’s. I guess I’ll stick with the 3-terminal regulator and 4 ohm resistor.
I like the idea. Something we should bring up to Frits on the backstage list is whether he would support a shop feature on the next LMR where both members and visitors can buy the boards. Obviously, Proceeds would go to defray costs and a percent of any profit could go towards supporting LMR. Maybe a standard for the boards could be a logobot.
Ideas for boards:
A multi sn754410 motor driver board (2-4 chips) for higher capacity
Several members (RoBotX, brooksware2000, JAX) have produced or are working on small robot boards.They might be interested in a LMR branded model that is sold through the site, since we get lots of traffic.
It's a SN754410 Board, controlled by a 1x6 header, or a 2x5 header. There is also space to solder wires directly to the board. It has separate supplies, one for the 5V logic (connected to the 2x5 header) and one for the 12V motor power. It has no flyback diodes, because frankly you dont need them unless you are using a switch mode power supply somewhere in your system, however it has a bulk capacitor on the 12V supply to help reduce motor draw and spikes. It is not fused, however it will be very easy to do so.
It's single sided with only 2 jumpers, which makes it very easy to produce. on the unetched/unclad side, we can adhere paper to the back with the profiles of the parts that will mount there, basically a ghost image. We can print various images onto the paper also, logos, etc.
As I recall Fritz was looking for and ardiuino board for the start here robot. A board that would have all the IO for motors and sensors. Something like that would be nice.
Would it be possible to design a multi-chip Motor driver board, whereby the end user plugs in the number of drivers required to up the current capacity. This is just a thought due to being borderline on a few of my robots and ending up piggy backing chips to up the current caperbility. Makes a more flexible board overall.
