Today is a sad day, poor little Sheldon the wonderbot 1.0 is no more. Due to a design floor several of his wires came loose whilst traversing the kitchen step and the rest as they say is history. However now that even Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again I am filled with optimism and am looking at this sad event as an opportunity for an upgrade 🙂

I started by striping the poor little bot down to see what I could salvage. Luckily most of the damage was just wiring related and the loose wires have not seemed to have burnt out any of the major components (despite the smell and visible smoke).

Fig 1: Current wiring – Motor controller and Xbee

Fig 2: Rats nest wiring

In order to cut down on the rats nest wiring I am contemplating swapping the Xbee Explorer Regulated board with the ArduinoXbeeShield that I have been playing with as of late.

The downside to this is that I will have to increase the length of the spaces between the base and the cover. The decision is still out on this one until I see how it affects the aesthetic, but I have decided to use the shield for now to facilitate the upgrade of the control system.

Today’s efforts and the new control system can be seen in the following video:

The current state of play

So far the rebuild is going well and I will post developments as they happen