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