Yesterday, despite the interference of a minor earthquake, I finished assembling a first draft of the Gado 2′s main control board. The board arrived from BatchPCB last week, and the parts came in from Digikey and Sparkfun on Monday. Assembly was not too challenging. The parts count on the board is relatively low; the trickiest …
Category Archive: Build Phase
Aug 19
Board is Here
Yesterday the first manufactured prototype PCB for the Gado 2 arrived from BatchPCB. Manufacturing quality looks great! I checked it over with a multimeter, and all the connections correspond to the schematic. So all looks good thus far; next step is to source the parts and assemble the first complete control board. Click on the …
Aug 08
First Lift!
Since I’m currently waiting on having my first Gado 2 PCB fabbed by BatchPCB, I decided to spend the morning creating a complete mockup of the device’s electronics. I grabbed a mini breadboard and a box of (colorful) jumper wires from Radioshack, and connected everything up according to the schematic for the soon-to-arrive PCB. For …
Jul 29
The Saga of the Pump
The Gado robots are designed to pick things up and move them around. Obviously, then, picking things up is a pretty crucial feature; moving things around without first picking them up doesn’t really get you anywhere. Both the Gado 1 and Gado 2 do their picking-up using suction; they press a suction lifter (kind of …
Jul 27
First PCB!
Today, I completed the schematic and layout for the first revision (0.1) of the Gado 2′s main circuit board. The board is designed as an Arduino shield (starting from the Protoshield as a template), and will snap onto an Arduino Uno. Basically, the board is mostly a mess of connectors (3 headers for servos, 3 …
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