Ok, Is this a good pin assignement? I would replace pin 24 and add another IR range finder?
Hi Sam,
I have not done this myself either, but I have thought about doing it. The way I would start would be to look at a couple of examples and choose one of them as a starting point and then remove the parts that you don’t need and maybe add other things that you do want.
I would personally choose a microcontroller that has more IO pins on it than I think I need as I am always finding I want more. So in your case if you can afford the space I would probably go up to a 40 pin Atmega chip such as the Atmega16-16pc or if you want lots something like an Atmega128.
An example Atmega16 board can be found in the Seattle Robotics Society Workshop robot. The Level 1 manual (as well as the Level 2 manual show the schematics for the board. seattlerobotics.org/WorkshopRobot/index.php. I believe that there are eagle cad design files for a previous version of this board up on the Yahoo group AVRRobotControl. At one point I was going to try to build my own version of this board. Things I wanted to change included the appropriate pins brought out to allow me to hook it up to JTAG for programming and debugging. You also need to consider how you are going to download your program to the chip (Parallel, SPI, Boot loader).
I would also try to make sure that my pin assignments allowed me to use the hardware features of the Atmega chip. For example if I were using the Atmeaga16 or 32… chips I would want to make sure that I could use:
Serial programmer: pins xxx
JTag: Pins TMS/TCK/TDI/TDO (PC2-PC5)
USART: RXD, TXD
SPI: MISO, MOSI, SCK, ~SS
TWI(I2C): SCL, SDA
External Interrupts? Int0, Int1 (example maybe for encoder?)
PWM???
…
Once I mapped out all of these major subsystems, I would then finally assign the unused I/O pins to other things such as LEDS…
Good Luck
Ouff.
Ok.
I’m ordering the sumovore right now with the Atmel chip add-on. I think it’s better to start like this. I will be able to program and modify the little bugger. Then I can take the same chip and try to do something on my own after working with this one. This hole thing (programable ICs) is really complexe for me… 
That’s probably the best idea. 
Yeah, after thinking it thru, it’s much less expensive and I’ll probably have more fun building/programing it. After i can customise it if I wish.
Well, It’s arriving tomorow (That’s waht post Canada says).
When I get the hang of the hole stuff I might change motor and creat my own “body” for the 'bot while keeping the brains. I also have to learn how to work with ateml chips.
Centre of Sciences of Montreal is having it’s annual week for robot demonstrations. It’s nice to see evrything the show you. I will inspire me 
It would be fun that they have custom robots, last year they had students from France that had studied in robotics and they showed us There robots, that was really nice.
Come down the the CNRG next November!
Ahh, that’s for sure! I’ll probably go there by train
Ok, I started building it, probably finish it over the weekend (it’s pretty packed, otherwise I could have done it friday
It looks really nice so far. I’ll have full of time over summer to try to upgrade to compete (maybe) against you guys.
The sumovore is lots of fun to build. The instructions are really nice too. Follow them closely and you will have working robot first try.
Well, I followed the instructions to the letter, and then it didn’t work when I put on the switch… I tried different batteries, still nothing. The I was thinking that I would have to go tru ALL the soldering I did 
But then I saw that the spring in the battery holder wasn’t working propely and the positive side of the battery wasn’t touching That was realeving.
I’m trying to build myself a ring for the moment.