Finally, the new Sumo robot is assembled, and up and moving :-):

Somo Robot Assembled

The new design is much cleaner, and so far the new motor connector cables are looking good. As always, we had a few bumps:

1. The boards came with the 5V LDO/DC-DC converter not populated/missing, so we had to solder it by hand (thanks to the team for making a quick turnaround)
2. We screwed up on the instructions/images for the motor connector cables. This is fixed now, but caused some students to make the work twice (I again apologize for that!)
3. Test points for quadrature encoder signals have been added.
4. The green power LED is too faint, will need to improve that in a redesign.
5. The base board features a nRF24L01+ socket (same as the Freescale FRDM-K64F board). I want to avoid to solder in the module directly, so we are checking a few connector options, so it does not conflict with the Arduino shields.
6. The sensor shields (ultrasonic sensor, infrared sensors, Bluetooth and nRF24L01+ modules) are in production, will get them in a week or so. Using the baseboard Bluetooth connector for this week lab.

On the left the new production sumo robot, on the right side the preproduction we have populated internally (see “First New Zumo Board out of the Reflow Oven” and “Zumo Robot with WiFi and GPS“):

Production and Preproduction Sumo Robot

Sumo Robot with Bluetooth and nRF24L01+

Building the robot is now much easier, the most complicated part is probably the soldering for the motors (see “New Sumo Robot PCBs Arrived!“). Pololu has now (after we started the production 😦 ) new magnetic/hall effect encoder (Pololu #2598) we would like to use in the next: that would make it even easier, and we would not need the signal conditioning logic any more (see “Processing the Pololu Motor Shaft Encoders“) :-).

Happy Roboting 🙂