Chapter 3 Summary

This chapter covered BOE Shield-Bot assembly and testing.  Assembly involved both mechanical construction and circuit-building, and testing used some new programming concepts.  Here are the highlights:

Hardware Setup

  • Mounting the servos on the robot chassis
  • Attaching the wheels to the servo motors, and the tail wheel to the chassis
  • Mounting the BOE Shield with the Arduino onto the chassis

Electronics

  • What a piezoelectric speaker is, and how to add one to the BOE Shield-Bot’s breadboard circuits
  • What frequency is, the units for measuring it, and what frequency range is audible to human hearing
  • What a low-battery brownout condition is, and how certain servo maneuvers can cause it

Programming 

  • How to use the Ardunio’s tone function to play beeps on a piezospeaker
  • What a serial buffer is, and how to use it with the Arduino’s Serial.available function  
  • How to use the transmit pane of the Serial Monitor, and the Serial.read function, to send data to the Arduino
  • How to use a for loop with an incrementing variable to change a servo’s RPM
  • How to add tone function calls to a sketch to audibly indicate the completion of a programming task

Engineering Skills

  • Implementing a brownout indicator strategy to help determine if unexpected robot behavior is due to a low-battery condition, and not a programming error
  • What a transfer curve graph is, and how it can be useful to understand the servo control signal vs. servo RPM relationship