It Broke!!

I took K-9 out for a long test drive and the drive system failed. This meant having to take K-9 to pieces where i found the gearboxes were not assembled particularly well so once these had been stripped and reassembled the drive system appears to be working again but has slowed on the right side. This may need replacing at a future date but I will see if the PID software can overcome this.
While K-9 was having open heart surgery I decided to take the opportunity to fit a webcam into the head. I had bought a micro-cam some time ago and picked a low resolution camera to save on processing time and network bandwidth. To fit the camera I removed the original casing and drilled a hole into the head of K-9 to take the lens. The power LED I had fitted needed to be removed to accomodate the camera PCB and the camera was superglued into place.

I then added a new power led which would fit into the small gap left above the PCB. This came in the form of a blue 3mm LED.

Good old superglue is used here again to fix the LED in place.

Here is the front of the head.

Without bright light the camera is hardly visible.

Another item which needed attention and came to light during extended testing was a build up of heat inside the robot. The heat sinks on the H-Bridge get very warm during operation and are uncomfortable to the touch. The H-Bridge itself will operate comfortably up to 125 degrees Celsius but the other components will not so this heat needed to be removed. I decided to fit 2 slim 40mm fans to the front of the robot to pull air through the body.

Here is a picture of the marking out before drilling with a hole saw.