Last week I was successful at building a second Gyro/Accelerometer combo board. And it works as well. It was a little scary at first, as I accidentally caused a short on the gyro chip and had to remove the chip, clean up the chip and the PCB and resolder it back down. In this case I used a ADXRS300 chip with 300 gegress per second performance versus the earlier PCB using a 150 degree per second chip. Those hot air SMD rework stations are worth their weight in gold.

It was a busy week, I got most of my new balancing robot built up. I made up a PCB co-processor board using a Atmel ATiny26 MCU to use with the gyro combo board, and I also got the Atmel ATMega128 MCP main PCB built up and tested as well. Now comes the fun part, wiring in all the stuff and getting it all programmed. I am using two of the new Hbridge motor controllers from NewMicros and I'll be running the motors using 16 NMH AA cells for about 19.2v. The plan is to have the ATiny26 read the Gyro and accelerometer chips and keep the robot in balance. The Atiny26 will also monitor the serial port for commands from the main MCU. The main MCU will tell it to go forward, reverse, slow, faster or turn left or right as needed. I've mounted a couple of encoder discs to the wheels with encoders so I can get distance traveled information or RPM indications as well. Lots of little things to do now.