A dream of mine since childhood, building a robot, always seemed like something that I would never find time to complete. Being that Short-Circuit was one of my favorite movies from the 80's as I was growing up, I guess it was inevitable that I'd want to build a robot one day.
At the ripe old age of 27, I have decided to tackle a few of the goals that I've had for years. Having a full workshop and scrap supplies available to me, I no longer have any excuses. Also I have to give credit to societyofrobots.com for their generous advice and forums for this project.
Giving engineering and science education demonstrations in local schools during graduate school has given more reasons to begin building robots. Robot demonstrations are a great opportunity to show students about engineering in a way that is entertaining and educational.
This first bot will be a differential drive robot that mostly performs object-avoidance. I am building the bot from basic components: an ATMega8 microcontroller, resistors, capacitors, servos, photoresistors, etc. I will use an external programmer to download and test various control algorithms.
Workshop day one ...
Soldering for the first time went smoothly for a while, but I eventually learned the hard way how solder wicks can save a project. Today I've finished half of the brains behind the machine; I soldered most of the headers, the 28 pin DIP connector, a resistor, and LED. Since I will be using a newer programmer, the Pololu USB AVR 6-pin ISP programmer, than some guidelines that I have been following, I reconfigured the pin layout from 10-pin to 6-pin based on the programmer module pinout diagram.
Bandsaw skills from ME2110 at my alma mater came in handy as I cut a circular CD-sized disc from a 3/8" thick polypropylene sheet. A nearby machine shop donated the PP sheet.
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