Dismay. Chagrin. I'm bummed out, man. Failure to meet three deadlines. Well, two really, because the one got postponed. Regardless, this bot has run out of time again. I was making good progress, totally on my way to having a submission for the Make character bot contest. Most of the hardcore fabrication of the bot itself had gone by with only a few mad hatter moments. All subsystems had passed the proof-of-concept tests. I was making progress at an unprecidented rate. That was up until late, late, late last night.
Finally getting the complete circuit breadboarded (yes, finally!) it failed to cut the mustard. The servo jitter is out of control and I think it has something to do with my almost constant I2C communication between the 20X2 servo driver PICAXE and the 18M2 "main brain." I think I need to do a LOW SERVOPIN command after each SERVOPOS (and change SERVOPOS to SERVO) to stave off the jitter... but there is zero time left to redesign/recode/retroubleshoot. Plus the angel eye circuit failed to activate for some reason and I can't tell ya why. :sigh: Out of time. Like tears in rain. I knew it would come down to the wire and it was going to be all or nothing. Damn you, nothing.
I think I might try to rework the thing into a 28X2 now after some deep thinking. I haven't done the pin count yet, I just devised the idea and potential program structure in the darkness of my mind this morning. :grimace: Failure sucks. Fortunately working in R&D has taught me good and well that life in general is mostly failure en route to glory. \o/ glory!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IN8R8HHT_c