Got the parts!! Been investigating.

All the parts have now arrived except for the TIP102 transistors. The main challenge has been trying to fit all of the components of the robot into the rather small chassis of K-9. I attached the tracked drive system to the bottom of the toy so it protrudes out of the bottom by around 30mm. If time allows and there is sufficient space I will introduce this into the body of the robot later on so that it looks right.

Marking for the drilling points

Chassis attached to base plate. Battery tray and guide wheel have been cut out to make more room inside the robot for other components.

To give an idea of scale that is an HP Officejet 6110 he is sat on.

Removing the unwanted plastic was a tricky task. It would be nice to have some proper tools for doing this.

The tracks are mounted quite far towards the front of K-9. His head is quite heavy so under braking he could topple forwards so for this reason i moved the tracks as close to the front as possible.

With the order came the control PC. This is a VIA PX10000G (details here) which is a Pico-ITX form factor PC. Tiny does not even come close to describing this thing. Here is a picture - no i do not have giant hands!!

I've got a 4GB flash card and put XP on it. I used the instructions here to 'embed' the operating system and enable EWF.I connected up both Velleman control boards and ran the test program on both. I also had a wireless dongle plugged in and connected via Remote Desktop.

The special power supply is also very impressive, an M3-ATX from LinITX.

I ran the entire set-up from a 3000mAh 14.8V LiPo pack with a meter inline to measure the current. Under full load the whole lot pulls 0.7 Amps so this battery will power the robot for some considerable time (calculated to 4.29 hours!!). With this in mind I may omit the umbillical option from the build.