Hi everyone. I have been working on a robot project for a few months now and it's really going well. I have a arduino 2560 board, line following, ultrasonic wall avoiding and remote control. However, because of all of the parts I have in my bot it is rather heavy and slow. It burns out motors really fast.
I have incorporated all the parts that I need for this build, and am not looking at adding anything more, as far as I'm concerned it's almost finished.
However I would like to make a lightweight version so that I am not having overheating issues with the motor controller and motors. So I was going to use the main PCB as the robot's chassis. To do this I am going to have to design a custom 2560 board. Below are things that I will need on this custom board.
5A BEC (custom on board)
Motor driver l298n
Servo mounting position.
line following modules (possibly mounted on another PCB held by stand-offs).
Programmer chip USB > UART
Motor mounts
Headers for hobby king 6ch receiver
Expansion header to bring out any un-used pins (future development and testing)
After drawing some sketches and rough designs on eagle, I think that I can do all of this. I might order some professional silk screened boards for my final build. I will first build the indervisual components to test (ie motor drive, arduino board ect) and make sure they work well before I build the final thing and incorporate all the parts on the same PCB.
Obviously, I will need to use alot of surface mount components to pull this off. Mostly surface mount caps and resistors, nothing too difficult. However, my main concern is the 2560. I am looking at using a hacked toaster oven to re-flow it, However I haven't used a re-flow oven before, so I have no idea how successful this will be.
Assuming that I get some practice on some scrap boards before trying to do this; do you think that I am diving into this too quickly? Is trying to solder the 2560 chip too big of a problem for me to start?
Thanks, David.