Disassembly II – Brain transplant
Tonight I did two things I have been putting off for way too long: I tested the Hexbug on a different power supply and I completely excised it’s controls.
I wanted to make sure that the bug would work, and confirm that indeed it was powered by the three LR44 batteries in parallel. I am pretty sure that this is the case now. I checked out the battery holder, and it definitely looks like it there. When I plugged it into a 3V lithium watch battery (less voltage than the 4.5V I think it is running on now) it was quite sluggish, as expected. Not sure on how the mAh play into it yet… In the process of wiggling it around, I popped the negative lead off of the battery holder, so I just went ahead and desoldered the wires connecting the motors to the board. Now only the tiny little wires that lead to the motors exposed. I was hoping to get them plugged into the breadboard directly, but they are too short at the moment. I will need to get some longer wires!
Here are a couple shots from the process.
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My next steps for this little fella are going to be for me to figure out the best way to get longer wires into a breadboard like in the picture above. I would much rather not have to take out the motors from their little home, so if possible I want to solder to wires to something else to plug them in. The wires are super thin, and I don’t know enough yet to tell whether they need to have little wires, or if I could use a thicker gauge. My instincts tell me that they are meant to be tiny, so I will get some thin wire and go from there. I think all in all it went well considering I had that burning hot iron near all the plastic! I can’t wait to get the motors running!
After putting a couple things on the robot, I think that making it as lightweight as possible is going to make a big difference. In fact I have been thinking about getting a little Lilypad Arduino for the second one, since it is so tiny. I just have to see how big the components I need to control the motors going forward and reverse are.
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