Hack Notes CVA 090721

Making Kit Instructions, July 21st, 2009

4 Steps

Eric hacked up a template based on the Bat Detector instructions. There are 5 total pages: overview, electronics, enclosures, display, final assembly and calibration. Eric has finished the electronics & enclosures, and made a good stab at overview (need some good photos once kits are fully assembled). Skory has taken all the photos for the armature.

I have uploaded the html and images to ~/public_html/northpaw/ on the server.

Battery Life

Skory reports that even with the transistors, the new board is more efficient than the old board, his batteries are lasting 3 days now (instead of 2). Possibly this is because of the 8MHz chip, saving power on the arduino, and the 16DIP version of the TPIC, which is also lower power. With the switch bypassed (instead of using transistor), the power of the motors is considerably upped, so we'll have to scale back the PWM. This should save even more power, meaning our battery life will be awesome.

So many parts coming in soon

The 200 motors from China arrived yesterday. Soon the mouser order with LEDs, shrink tubing, and bags will come in. Dr. Jesus is bringing our ribbon cables. We are borrowing some nice gauge wire from noisebridge. Skory has finished the bootloader/programming rig, but we have yet to Gold the code (at very least need to decrease the motor strength and test for awhile).