Day Nine: VexDuino Assemley and Driving the Squarebot

Building VEXduino board 
This is a VEXduino board, it is an Arduino shield we will be using to connect to the VEX motors, servos, sensors and batteries with our Arduino Uno.

While Carlos was soldering the board, I installed the RobotC for Arduino preparing for the programming environment.

Setting up VEX's brain for programming
We have our Squarebot, RobotC installed and VEXduino board built and tested. Next, we connected our VEXduino shield to the Arduino then connect it to the battery.

Testing
Some of the work we did to make sure VEXduino board is good for driving properly:

 

We visually inspected all the solder joints for bridges. Measured the battery voltage between the two terminals where we plugged the battery into the board which is for motor pin 3

We measured ground and voltage pins of motor pin 3 as well because this voltage has to be the same as the battery voltage above and must be positive if not our battery may be reversed.

We measured Voltage and Signal pins for motor pin 3.It should read 0 volts

All these numbers have to be correct in order for the battery to operate properly.

 

All measurements and connections seems to go well and we are ready for the next step. We used the RobotC to setup the communication port for the VEXduino board before download the firmware onto its Brain. Carlos fixed some of the code I typed and finally we got the wheels all working properly and driving our Squarebot in the maze.

Well done! Carlos :-)