So, in order to support the change in meeting format I've begun working on my own extra low cost Mini-Sumo kit. It won't be a super-competitive kit, but it should be plenty educational and fun to build in a classroom/lab type scenario.
Meeting Format Change
Well folks it doesn't look like our Mini-Sumo contest is going to happen this month either. I think that we need to drop back a bit and change the format of our meetings. I'm thinking some combination of robotic theory and hands-on robot assembly in a more structured classroom style enviroment. The end result of the robot assembly part being a mini-sumo that folks can enter into our contest.
So I'm disappointed with another delay but I think that a more structured build strategy will ultimately bring more folks into the fold complete with working robots.
Reverse Engineering Board
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To reverse engineer the board I started with finding the steering motor functionality and working backwards to the board. Once that was accomplished, with club member’s help I was able to trace the motors back through a series of transistors made to work as an H bridge. Enabling me to find out how the chip works
Blunderifc
Well it seems I made another blunder quite some time ago and have only now just seen it. I finally got around to firing up Uno's sensor board for testing. The Transimpedance Amplifiers immediately got hot. After poking around a bit I discovered that the library component that I created for DipTrace has the pins in descending order.. on both side of the SOIC chip. Doh. I got lucky, two of the four pins are N/C on the bad side, but the output and the Vcc got swapped.
Regular Meeting Apr 18 (Updated)
04/18/2009 10:30
America/Chicago
Update: The 17th was a Friday. Corrected the day to be the normal Sat. Meeting
We were going to have our Mini-Sumo contest this month, but one of the three members that actually has a working Mini-Sumo will be out of town on that day. So, we will delay the contest until the May meeting.
Woops! Missed Meeting (UPDATED)
04/04/2009 10:30
America/Chicago
UPDATE: Sorry folks I have had a conflict come up and I need to shift the time back earlier in the day. I appologize for the inconvience, but I absolutely must be someplace at 2PM. The new time is 10:30AM to 1:30PM
Side Project: Necklace
My wife had been after me for a while to make her a necklace with a copper pattern. At last I got around to it this past week. I learned a few new things and it was also pretty good solder paste practice.
Blunder!
I've made an awful blunder in the design of my drive board for Uno. I really wanted to use these nice dual LED holders that I salvaged from a circuit board that TomG gave me. However, I was so excited to get to the part where I used the solder paste that I neglected to do any final fit measurements with the parts on paper or even on the un-soldered board. 
