Sometime last year I think, I made another stupid purchase that I thought I could use as a robot base out of the box. I bought what I thought was an OK Roomba knock-off off of Ebay. Turns out it was just a plastic shell with 2 motors inside. One to run the "Vacuum" and one that simultaneously drove the robot, and pointed it in a random direction. So a pretty good waste of $23. Buuuut, I think I want to not have it be a complete waste, and also get rid of the useless space consuming aspects of this purchase.
Anyway, I took a closer look at this and I think I could re-purpose the electronics board because it's got a nice charging circuit for the one mysterious battery and the button to turn it on and off. So I think I'll use this as the power supply and over the top switch for powering this LED project.
So you can see the nice button that toggles the circuit on and off. You can also see that one of the ends of both of the motors goes directly into the positive terminal of the battery, and the other end goes into a connection into the board. So some transistor on board is controlled is "turned on" when the button is pushed. The other red and white wires connect to the charging circuit, and what's convenient is that the other end of the cable provided is a USB, which means any old USB charger can be used to charge this device.
The next step of this project is to get these hooked up to an LED strip that I want to drive. Since the voltage I need is actually 12V instead of the 3.7-ish the battery on board provides, I went online to see if I could get anything like a boost converter, and as one expects there are some boards available on amazon. (I wish I didn't need to get it there, but I don't know where one can purchase such things and at similar prices). So my project should be able to continue soon with that after it arrives. Also since my LED strip I intend on driving is RBG, having a constant source to all the LED's means it could only ever be white light, so I think I'd like to add a microcontroller in the mix. I dug through my old things and I found some left over MSP430 chips. I have a great love for these things because they're so cheap on their own (< $3), you don't need a bunch of other components to run the chip, and because they come in DIP packages. (I wish this was like a sponsored post or something: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/texas-instruments/MSP430G2553IN20/296-28429-5-ND/2638885)
Anyway if you have like an old Launchpad board you can just program them, and pop the chip out and throw it somewhere else giving a smaller foot print (even smaller than like and Arduino Pro Mini). It's been a while since I've touched this stuff so I had to re-familiarize myself with my set up but ultimately got the basic Blink program to run again on a bread board. What's also convenient is that the input voltage for the chip can go up to like 4.2V? which is perfect to just directly use the battery. (I also seem to recall that there's an internal voltage regulator on the chip too, but I'm not sure, YOLO I guess.)
Anyway, I took a closer look at this and I think I could re-purpose the electronics board because it's got a nice charging circuit for the one mysterious battery and the button to turn it on and off. So I think I'll use this as the power supply and over the top switch for powering this LED project.
So you can see the nice button that toggles the circuit on and off. You can also see that one of the ends of both of the motors goes directly into the positive terminal of the battery, and the other end goes into a connection into the board. So some transistor on board is controlled is "turned on" when the button is pushed. The other red and white wires connect to the charging circuit, and what's convenient is that the other end of the cable provided is a USB, which means any old USB charger can be used to charge this device.
The next step of this project is to get these hooked up to an LED strip that I want to drive. Since the voltage I need is actually 12V instead of the 3.7-ish the battery on board provides, I went online to see if I could get anything like a boost converter, and as one expects there are some boards available on amazon. (I wish I didn't need to get it there, but I don't know where one can purchase such things and at similar prices). So my project should be able to continue soon with that after it arrives. Also since my LED strip I intend on driving is RBG, having a constant source to all the LED's means it could only ever be white light, so I think I'd like to add a microcontroller in the mix. I dug through my old things and I found some left over MSP430 chips. I have a great love for these things because they're so cheap on their own (< $3), you don't need a bunch of other components to run the chip, and because they come in DIP packages. (I wish this was like a sponsored post or something: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/texas-instruments/MSP430G2553IN20/296-28429-5-ND/2638885)
Anyway if you have like an old Launchpad board you can just program them, and pop the chip out and throw it somewhere else giving a smaller foot print (even smaller than like and Arduino Pro Mini). It's been a while since I've touched this stuff so I had to re-familiarize myself with my set up but ultimately got the basic Blink program to run again on a bread board. What's also convenient is that the input voltage for the chip can go up to like 4.2V? which is perfect to just directly use the battery. (I also seem to recall that there's an internal voltage regulator on the chip too, but I'm not sure, YOLO I guess.)
I think this ultimately should be a pretty quick project if I don't get too distracted by other things in the coming weeks. Optimistically this should be done by the end of February. 2020 is off to a promising start as far as my projects are concerned?
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