Circuits

[steamboat]

After finishing my RA04 design, I am also thinking about making a PCB. OK, the Arduino is cheap (10 Euro) and you get everything you need. But when it comes to wiring, it is a piece of work and chaos. Think about all the +/- 5 volt cables to servos, eyes and switches. I think about selling some left over RA04's after the MAKER FAIRE on ebay just to cover my costs. For this I need an easy and cheap to build PCB. By chance I have about 80 ordinary ATMEGA328 in the shelf but this is not a must. I am not the reflov man...

You could use an Arduino as USB connection between your board and the PC. But I am sure that you have good solutions.

So my first PCB must be a power and signal distributing PCB. It also could become a shield?

I want to connect some sort of ARDUINO with
2x servo for muscles
2x revolution "detectors" for syncronus/asyncronus run of the legs
2x or 3x servo for eyes
2x or 3x bumper switches at the front
2x or 3x bumper switches at the back
battery connector
On-Off switch to cut off the servos from the "main line" for tests. That should enable you to run the Arduino and all it's sensors on USB without a battery/extra source of energy.

Additional I think about
some push buttons to tell the unit what to do
- switching from autonomous to watchdog or BT behavior
some LED to indicate some status
a LCD?

Plus we can discuss other sensors:
a magnetic field sensor - have just some left overs frommy quadrocopter

Are such boards on the market already?

With this it would be easy to give the RepWalker/Shellmo away to other people which have a focus in programming and not in building or soldering. For me people with programming but not hardware hacking skills are a (small) market for this.

I also would like to give some of this to my daughters school but for this it has to look a little professional and easy to understand - not a piece of wires...