Datasheet

Assemble and Test your BOE Shield-Bot • Chapter 3
Robotics with the BOE Shield-Bot • 99
Chapter 3 Summary
This chapter covered BOE Shield-Bot assembly and testing. Assembly involved both
mechanical construction and circuit-building, and testing used some new programming
concepts. Here are the highlights:
Hardware Setup
• Mounting the servos and battery pack on the robot chassis
• Attaching the wheels to the servo motors, and the tail wheel to the chassis
• Mounting the BOE Shield with the Arduino onto the chassis
Electronics
• What a piezoelectric speaker is, and how to add one to the BOE Shield-Bot’s
breadboard circuits
• What frequency is, the units for measuring it, and what frequency range is
audible to human hearing
• What a low-battery brownout condition is, and how certain servo maneuvers can
cause it
Programming
• How to use the Arduino’s tone function to play beeps on a piezospeaker
• What a serial buffer is, and how to use it with the Arduino’s
Serial.available
function
• How to use the transmit pane of the Serial Monitor, and the
Serial.read
function, to send data to the Arduino
• How to use a
for loop with an incrementing variable to change a servo’s RPM
• How to add
tone function calls to a sketch to audibly indicate the completion of a
programming task
Engineering Skills
• Implementing a brownout indicator strategy to help determine if unexpected
robot behavior is due to a low-battery condition, and not a programming error
• What a transfer curve graph is, and how it can be useful to understand the servo
control signal vs. servo RPM relationship