My lawnmower robot

ok, so now i needed to connect the Arduino mega, with the old cpu socket. I got the inspiration from  a site i find searching for "grau goes color" He pulled apart a Tianchen TC-G158 robot. This robot is a cousin of the Supoman, using almost the same motherboard layout, so i started using his psuedo drawings, and most importantly i used this drawing as a basis seeing what my motherboard contained. MY board was a bit different.. For one the cpu, while still being a 32pin STC12C5410AD, wasnt in a lqfp-32 , mine was in sop-32 package. Mine also has an IR sensor pointed downwards, this being connected to another multiplexer, thats always pointed at the sensor.. i guess its a buffer or something So i had to trace the functions, and heres my resulting IO list. The sheet also shows how i linked it to the mega. The mega then was powered, from the old stc's programming connector, connection pin 1 & 4 of the programming port, to the micro usb. Then off to ardumover   t...

So, unhappy with the programming of my robot, and not wanting to start programming something totally unknown, i proceeded to desolder the original cpu, from my robots pcb.. luckily i had the spare one i got earlier, because i made a MESS of the first one. But with a bit of solderwick and a lot of patience, the second one was a succes.. Now to install something different. In went a Arduino MEGA 2560, with a dfrobot breakout board. Now i placed that on a wooden board, that i fixed in the robot with hotmelt glue. NICE. Now if i could only connect it to something

When the robot was moving my lawn, most of the time it was moving over the middle of the lawn, cutting the same patch over and over. I had some trees in a corner, and a swing in the other, and the robot newer quite got down behind them. So I made a simple hack. I created 2 loops of the guide wire instead of one.the first loop, goes around the garden, and left around the trees. The other loop, goes the other way around, and right around the trees. Controlling it, is two correspondence switches normally used for outdoor lighting. This forces the robot to spend time, on the difficult parts, instead of just happily moving the same patch over and over. An upgrade, could be to use relays instead, and then use a microcontroller to decide the pattern. Using a sensor to see, if the robot had been in the charger, and if so, switch to the other loop.

So i found out how to reverse the direction the robot moves along the edge wire. Exchange the sensor cables from the right and left wire sensing coils, then exchange the motor cables, for the right and left motors.. and install the motor cables with reversed polarity.. done. The robot thinks its doing its normal magic, but its going the other way round :-)

So I called the support department to get some support. I wanted it to go the other way around. No luck in doing that, no instructions or otherwise. But. He was interested in some development, and I thought I could use a new hobby. So I got an updated robot, an extra motherboard, a list of different arduino parts, a stack og lithium ion batteries and off we go

So..I  bought a robot lawnmower, a supoman, called rotenbach In germany. And being me, I didn't think it did a good enough job. It didn't cut the entire lawn, in one go. It went the wrong way around the garden. I couldn't put the charging station Where wanted. And it gets stuck too often. Not nearly good enough so of course, ill hack it.