RET 160: 2/1/2012

Today we continued our work on our circuit boards. I finished adding the final components to the board. After I finished soldering on the last pieces, I wove two pieces of blue wire through four holes, which had to be drilled bigger, and soldered one to the power terminal and the other to the diode at the bottom of the board. I also set the chips in their sockets, a Uln2003 darlington array, a L293NE driver and a Picaxe 40x2 micro controller. Next I soldered the toggle switch to the end of the blue wires, then put heat shrink over those solder joints. Next I began to work on DB9 programming cable. For our purposes we only need the 2, 3 and 5 pins. I stripped the grey outer insulator and then the insulators of each individual wire. I placed a piece solder in the number 2 socket then used the mulimeter to see which wire went to socket 2. I did the same thing for the number 3 and 5 sockets. After I had the correct wires I placed crimp sockets on each wire, so they can be connected to the 1x3 connector on our circuit board. They female end of the DB 9 cable will be plugged into a USB adapter then plugged into our laptops so we can program our circuit boards. After I finished the cable I assembled part of the robots body.