At the heart of the robot is the Pi. But how does it connect to everything else? Via the interconnect board of course 🙂
This little board is where *everything* connects – where all the sensors, motor drivers, power supplies, Pi, Propeller, etc come together. Its a very custom board for every robot, so I generally make it by hand using “padboard”. This is a cheap, 0.1 inch pitch board with drilled pads. Unlike stripboard, it doesn’t have defined tracks – so you make your own with solder bridges.
This allows a more compact layout than stripboard, while still being fairly quick/easy to use.
Our board has headers on it for logic power supply (in the middle), motor drivers (6 pins, near the edges), sonar pingers (blue) and servos (yellow).