Two recent events:

1) Managed to burn out a potentiometer while trying to check the current draw on a DC motor. Got a plume of smoke.

2) Managed to leave the soldering iron on for 24 hours. Doh! The tip was toast. Thankfully I have a spare. Need to buy more I guess.

Collateral Damage

Hopefully there are not too many days like these.

My servo and a motor shields arrived. The motor shield motivated me to look into sourcing a chassis and accessories for building a small two wheeled robot. Looks like I’m going to be building the ubiquitous “avoid walls” robot.

While researching wheeled robots I discovered “sumobots”. Very cool. Having robot competitions seems like a great way to give robot building some focus and at the same time make it even more fun.