Project:Line-following Robot

As part of the Arduino 102 (or is it 201?) we built line-following robots...

((insert video here!))

Photos at https://plus.google.com/photos/101627167067307203883/albums/5758095721560984897 ((the upload process takes too long from the wiki so I'll sort it out later))

I want to now move the circuit off my Arduino Uno with breadboard and onto a Xino with a "micro-shield". What's a micro-shield? It's a ghetto Arduino shield that uses just a few of the pins and can be knocked together cheaply with a few scraps of stripboard and pins.

File:IMAG2029.jpg

I found this tiny bit of spripboard that was 12x4 holes but nicely separated down the middle...

I have loads of male header pins (we have boxes of them at Hackspace and I also get them from work) and here I'm using 7 pins that fit in digital pins 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and the ground pin. That gives me access to 3 digital pins with PWM and 3 without...

The line-follower robot requires two PWM pins to drive the motors via a mosfet...

I mounted the two mosfets with drain pins to a common ground linked to the GND pin...

I don't want to solder my motor wires on as I want to swap them between projects so I have two header pins per motor connection, slightly bent outwards, one pin goes to source on the mosfet and one pin goes to +5v...

I'm using jumpers as little F-F connectors (a little trick I developed to save on expensive female headers)...

The mosfets need gate connections (middle pin) to the PWM pins to switch on the motors...

We also have a little jumper wire to go to the 5v pin on the other side of the Arduino...