Circuit Boards Ordered, Abby Upgraded

I finally finished the layout for the three circuit boards last week. I did some breadboard work to validate my design choices for the opto-isolators. I had to change one resistor, and I realized that the transistor I was using to drive solenoid coil wasn’t big enough, so I replaced it with a TIP102 Darlington.

Originally, I was going to make these circuit boards on the board router down in thinkbox, but Greg has some extra money that expires at the end of the month, so I combined them all into one board and ordered it this morning with the $33 each deal from Advanced PCB. I also included a few 2mm->DIP20 breakout boards for breadboarding with the XBEE radio modules.

I spent most of the afternoon upgrading Abby’s pc to Ubuntu 12.04 and ROS fuerte. I think everything is properly installed now. Next, I need to see if the LIDAR works. I’d like to do it without the usb adapter since the pc I chose has a serial port. Once that’s up and running, all I have to do is wire up the encoders and the estop and test out manual control. I’ll probably wait to do this until my circuit boards come in.

I also met one of Wyatt’s undergrad researchers and set him up to work with Gazebo on the solidworks PC with my GTX480. He’s having issues getting ogre to work property (both standalone Gazebo and ROS), but I was able to get ROS Gazebo working on Abby’s pc, which is running the same version of Ubuntu. I told him I’d look into it.

Now that he and John are both working in the lab, I decided to give them each a desk with a workstation. I also gave Steph and Bill each a desk.