Sumovore Completion

Finished assembling the Sumovore today. All in all, I’m not sure what to make of it – the kit has some nice features, but doesn’t have the same sort of “solid” feel that the MarkIII does. Give and take, I suppose. The MarkIII, when it’s done, feels a bit more professional, but the Sumovore at least came with documentation! Caveat, the docs were a little off in a couple of places – particularly when telling you to place Resistor R27 on the discrete brainboard – apparently at some point one of the resistors was replaced with a diode, so there’s “eight (not 8, not 10, but 9!)” diodes to be installed, and the resistor destined for R27 (“completely ignoring R26″) actually goes in R26. And yes, there are indeed nine diodes.

Other than the small mishap with the docs, assembly is pretty straightforward – a lot of little components but nothing overly complicated or unusual. There are a few areas where I was left to wonder why the specific installation order had been chosen, and almost certainly there are a couple of items which should be handled differently, but on the whole it was easy going.

Once assembled, it’s a matter of tweaking potentiometers to get the ‘bot to function optimally; there’s one each for the left and right pair of edge sensors, one for the forward facing IR sensors, two to tweak motor behavior, and one to adjust the startup delay.

I’ll move on to the BS2 brainboard sometime in the next couple of weeks; I’ve got some projects that need attention, but I’ve been stuck at a plateau on one of them and needed to distract myself for a little while to clear my mind.