11/15/2006 progress:

What have I been up to? Well mainly I have been thinking about how to physically interface my sensors and peripherals to the MAVRIC. The MAVRIC has 6 8-pin headers (he offers screw terminals too) for each port of the ATMega128 cpu. I am being playing with my pin layout to consolidate as many pins on a port as I can. Some pins are too specialized for this (A2D, UART) and thus I have it down to 4 ports.

Also I have three serial devices but only two serial ports. I need to play with bit-banging to one of them (most likely the voice module).

I have not touched the bot in over a week, but I did place an order to www.sparkfun.com for some odds and ends. This weekend I am testing for level three in Krav and then I’ll work on a interface board. But then I’m still in a circle. Do I need an interface board, or do I create custom wiring harness with 5 8-pin connectors on one end and sensor connectors on the other. Or do I create 4 8-pin bus connectors to a connector board and tie the port pins to their connectors using wire wrapping or point to point soldering and then run another connector from the board to the sensor. I like the second method better but it’s more connectors and thus more to screw up.

Here is what my connector board looked like on a previous robot: http://www.geocities.com/jaydmdigital/ieee/jamaica.html 3rd picture.

After I get the whole connector thing decided, I can work on the PID, line sensors, IR sensor, etc… so you see it really is a key decision.

Hmmmmm…

Jay