Day Two of a Five-minute Job

Yesterday I began a task which led to several others - today I got back on track with what I started.

The Domino Effect

When taking on a task, it's generally accepted that doing it right is always better than doing it over later.  However, there are often limitations which mean that most tasks end up being done over later because you couldn't manage to do them right the first time.

A Man Needs to Build

It's true - I think just about every man needs to actually build something every so often.  For me, this need was fulfilled today, with the construction of my prototyping assembly.

Shhh! Be vewy vewy quiet - I'm hunting Power Suppwies!

Today has been a long day.  I've spent just about all of it looking into a solution for powering the Mini-ITX board from a battery.

Motor Control, Budgetting and SEPIC converters

I began today by thinking about motors and capacitors.  Currently, the robot has no motor decoupling capacitors.  Thinking about both EMI from commutation and the need for PWM to remain unfiltered, it's quite simple to figure out how big the capacitors are allowed to be.  I'm aware that most DC motors are typically used with '104' ceramic capacitors (100nF).

Hardware Homework, plus "Using the Right Tool for the Job" Lesson

This morning I actually looked at the gparted output from last week.  The 1.93GB used on the disk looks very promising if the system is to be transferred onto a 4GB compact flash card.

Pruning Xubuntu

Today involved work to the operating system on the PC board.

Some Proper Engineering

Today involved quite a bit of planning of how I'm going to continue developing the robot.

The Gathering of Information

Today began with performing some basic measurements to verify some information that appeared in a past report, as well as some additional information.

Interesting Installation

Yesterday, I failed to install Xubuntu on the Mini-ITX board when I found that the kernel was too recent and the CPU was no longer supported.

A Starting Point

Some Toys to Play With

I've had a meeting with my project supervisor, and acquired the robot and a box of extra parts that has already been acquired by past students.  Looking in the box, there are several useful components:

In The Beginning...

Introduction

This blog will serve as a day-to-day summary of my work on a two-wheeled robot as part of my MEng degree in Electronic Engineering.  Originally I intended to do video recordings, but used audio recordings instead when I couldn't find any simple software to do that.  Since then, I've discovered how long audio editing takes.

So now, having completed about two and a half weeks of the project, I'm reverting to text, and rewriting all the information I've produced so far.  Hopefully someone will find some of it useful.  Anyway, on with the show...