A Cheaper PCB For The Robot Tank

2019-08-12 - By Parth Patel, Kinjal Badhiwala, Yashasvi Bhatt, Robert Elder

Introduction

The purpose of this article is to review the results of a project undertaken by Parth Patel Kinjal Badhiwala, and Yashasvi Bhatt.. The project goals included:

Redesigning the PCB to decrease size and cost.
Fixing issues and design flaws in the power management of the motors.
Porting over the PCB design files from Altium software to KiCad.

Results

All primary objectives of the project were completed. The resulting improved PCB layout design files can be downloaded here in KiCad format.

The students also produced a detailed report discussing their work on the project. The report provides an analysis of the current, voltage and RPM of the robot tank motors under various conditions. They also discuss some of the physical characteristics of the components.

Cost Reduction

The previous PCB design was purchased hastily without much research or design considerations for keeping costs low. It cost a total of $86 USD ($113.87 CAD) for 5 PCBs from PCBway. The new design cost $26.98 CAD for 5 PCBs from JLCPCB.

All About SD Card Flash Memory Corruption in Cameras & Raspberry Pis Published 2019-04-22	$1.00 CAD Terminal Block Mining Simulation Game	Monitoring of Plant Growth on a Budget With Arduino Published 2018-08-20	Can You Build a Streaming Video Robot Tank for ~$100? Published 2018-09-01
Automated Plant Watering With Arduino Published 2018-12-22	A PCB For The Robot Tank Published 2018-12-24	Improved Tilt Pan Camera Control For The Robot Tank Published 2019-08-12	Robot Tank Quality Assurance & Design Evaluation Published 2021-05-09

Why Bother Subscribing?

Free Software/Engineering Content. I publish all of my educational content publicly for free so everybody can make use of it. Why bother signing up for a paid 'course', when you can just sign up for this email list?
Read about cool new products that I'm building. How do I make money? Glad you asked! You'll get some emails with examples of things that I sell. You might even get some business ideas of your own :)
People actually like this email list. I know that sounds crazy, because who actually subscribes to email lists these days, right? Well, some do, and if you end up not liking it, I give you permission to unsubscribe and mark it as spam.