Sheesh – enough with the chickens already, you’d think I was writing a farm blog here or something. Anyways, my main goal for the year is to build a robot army to take over the tri-state area. I had some great success with my prototype, but I was using off the shelf Arduinos, and those things are nearly $40 a piece I mean their great and everything, but a 10,000 robot army would be $400,000 in Arduinos
alone! Who’s got that kind of budget?
So I started looking around and found these great plans to make your own Arduino clones for like $8 a pop. That would save me $320,000! That’s a lot of pastrami on rye, let me tell you. Anyways, I decided to make one on a breadboard first, because I wanted to make sure I could pull this off before I soldered a punch of stuff together. I found another Instructable where they show you exactly how to do that, and even give you a printable template to put on the breadboard.
I tell you what – this was not the greatest idea I ever had. The template didn’t line up exactly with the breadboard, I only had super-long jumpers left (to be used in place of their 0 Ohm resistors – really 0 Ohm resistors??) and the breadboard version is not as cleanly laid out as the perfboard one. On top of it all, I couldn’t find my 16Mhz crystals anywhere! So I ordered some more crystals at Amazon. Thank goodness for Free Prime shipping! I also ordered a 140-piece Jumper Wire Kit
, so we won’t have so many long cables in the way. Tuesday we’ll fire this baby up and see how long it can run until it blows up on me.