Hi guys,
Sorry for the long absence - been moving around for the last two weeks and just came back last week from Oregon. Anyways, I send a couple of design board for fabrication before I left but still haven't received it yet. So this will be a pain for awhile but I recently move forward rather than wait for the design board to arrive.
Got a PCB board from radioshack that I just soldered all the components that I plan to put in the board to used the XL_STAR. I wanted to just simply plugged the XL_STAR board on another PCB so I can used it for something else later on.
You will noticed that I placed a motor driver already beneath the board. The motor driver is from pololu.com.
As I mentioned on my previous post that my design will be about Robots - since it probably is not interesting to just simply create a robot that moves around - it might be interesting to implement a simple Proportional - Integral - Differential controller on inverted pendulum. Much like the Segway using XL_STAR. On some images that I attached in this blog - you can probably see that the mobile robot frame is from trossenrobotics. The motors comes with built in encoder on it already.
The orange PCB you will find on the images, is actually for adding more functionality to XL_STAR, power supply, motor driver, XBee (but may not implement it ). I have 12 volts, 7.69 Volts, and 5 V ouput, powered by a 3 cells lithium battery. I plan to add a 3.3 V power but I change it to 5V and simply cut a USB wire and simply connect the other end of the USB to the 5V. The 7.69 V is for the motors and the 12V - reserved for future used.
The mtor driver is connected to the following:
Left Motor:
PTF1
PTF2
Right Motor:
PTD2
PTD3
PTE7 is for Standby Signal.
Port A GPIO (A0-A3) - Encoder
The accelerometer will be used to find the orientation of the robot based on the sample code.
I guess you get the whole idea of my XL_STAR Design Entry already.
Well, back to work 
Joe
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