Ragworm PCBs

The Ragworm PCBs arrived! Actually they arrived a while ago, but I’ve been too busy at work to do much with them. They’re a lovely orange with immersion gold pads.

These PCBs are for mounting hall sensors. They then mount on to the motor above where the shaft sticks out the back of the motor. You glue (epoxy) a magnet to the shaft and then the hall sensor will give you encoder pulses corresponding to the rotation of the motor.

Then you couple that with servo control software (we’ve written our own software running on a propellor hat from Pimoroni) and you have a high power, continuous rotation servo that can be powerful enough to run a CNC machine (depends on your motors of course).

PiWars 2017

Well – we’ve been beavering away in the background on the next Metabot, and we’ve had 2 prototypes so far to the ‘remote control car’ stage.

The changes to skittles and the unknown quantity of the “slightly deranged golf” are causing mechanical design headaches and we’ve got big plans for the software that might or might not come to fruition in time for the event. With less than 2 months to go, its certainly squeaky bum time!

This time I’ve tried experimenting with making my own PCBs:IMG_20170121_180217

Before eventually deciding that I couldn’t get enough accuracy for a 0.5mm pitch SSOP device and getting Ragworm to make the boards for me.  I’ll post pictures of those when they arrive.  I’m sure I’ll have good enough accuracy for traditional through-hole PCBs at 0.1″ pitch though.

And here’s out latest prototype.  TBD if this will be the chassis that we actually compete with, but its a good starting point for playing with the software:

IMG_1011 IMG_1012