Crawler Tuning

I found the eccentricity in the Motor Drive Pulley.  I had made an assumption that the set screws in the pulley were too short to engage the notch on the gear motor's drive shaft.  I pulled the set screw out, and measured it against the gear motor's shaft notch.  Turns out that it is long enough to engage the notch, and had a few threads left in the set screw hole.  This lets the outside radius of the shaft hold the pulley by its bore, eliminating the need for the little piece I made to fill the notch.  Now the drive train runs relatively smoothly, and with a load it is more stable.

Iz also wiring the brainz.  Wiring is always kind of a mess, and I start with leftover pieces of other projects from my multitudinous scrap buckets.    There was a time where I wired everything through a terminal block.  Now I am more PCB-centric, but still use those old phenolic blocks every once in a while.

Once you get the wires under control it starts looking better.  I have adapted these Brainz from another project so I will have to do some rework to make it compatible with what I am doing now.  I've got a better potentiometer for the speed control, so the green pot on the board is going.  Then I need to rewire the ICSP connector.  I've been using a PICKit3 lately, and the ICSP connector needs to conform to the pinout on the PICKit3.  Before I was using PWM as a signal to control a motor.  This time I want to modulate power.  So, I need to replace the bipolar 2n2222 transistor with a power MOSFET, probably a IRFZ44.

 Then I need to add connectivity to the wireless module.  We picked Bluetooth, so there is one interface.  Then there is the sensor which is another serial peripheral type device.  There is also another structural piece, a place to mount the sensor.  I'm thinking about making a bent piece with thin (0.032") Aluminum, still musing tho...