How to design and plan your project?

Well ain't that a tricky question? How to design and plan your project?

I'll start by saying there's no right or wrong here! You may as well start with your circuitry before the chassis.
I'll just tell you how I planned my project.

With that said, let's start!

I had thought of making a robot during a rather long period of time, before I actually put the wheel in motion. I had pondered the possibilities of how and what to create long before I started. Since that is the uttermost fundamental question to answer, I'll ask you the same! Do you know what to create? Let me and others know below!

The first thing I did was to write down the features i wanted my robot to have. I came up with the following list of things:

• Remotely controllable via bluetooth (or equal)
• Distance sensor(s) in front to keep track of obstacles
• Ride height so that my robot could bash through the nature without problems
• A long range camera so that i could see and steer the robot without actually have visual contact with it
• It should be good looking! =) Yep that's important ;-)
• Use of my Android® phone's sensors and GPS
• Long range functionality (>1 mile to 2 miles)

As you can see this is a long list of, as I'm aware, hard things to achieve. But with alot of time and effort I made it work and so will YOU!

I chose to go with an Arduino since they are easy to use and even more easy to teach others in how to use. So I went out and bought myself an Arduino UNO which have the following (critical) specs:

Flash Memory	32 KB (ATmega328) of which 0.5 KB used by bootloader
SRAM	2 KB (ATmega328)
EEPROM	1 KB (ATmega328)
Clock Speed	16 MHz

This is enough memory and speed to make a really advanced robot (not a neuro-robot, but almost =) ).
Since my build will be a real-time implementation we really need to think about speed and drawbacks. One significant drawback to the UNO is that it's clocked at 16MHz. I would really love to go all the way to 20MHz but as it obviously turns out, the ATmega328p isn't rated for such speeds. Douh!

The next thing i needed was a chassis and since i had my list, things were pretty straight forward! I bought a second hand Traxxas® REVO 3.3. A remote controlled, BAD-ASS monster truck. It had an ride height of about 4.25" (~110mm)!! I thought that would be enough =)
But as it turns out i was going to learn a hard lesson... I bought the car for a pittance and when it arrived, it lacked almost everything interesting. Like an engine, RC-system and so on. It was just a rolling chassis!#&!% And in really bad condition!


So what do you think? Is it better to buy a brand new truck rather then buying a second hand one?
Feel free to comment below!


Next time I'll show the building and assembly of the chassis! And I'll also show how badly handled the chassis were!


Circuits out!