Arduino interface coming along

With a full time job and a family, its hard to get time, but I did some work over the weekend. I have a preliminary schematic of the interface circuitry and I've done some tests on the system. It looks like the CPU is fast enough to process the encoder interrupts for each wheel at full speed under no-load.

I'll try to get some hard numbers posted soon.

Mouse Encoder System is Dead

During my tests, I am sad to say, a small blue spark observed did, in fact, kill the chip on the mouse pc board. It no longer communicates with the host system and no longer seems to power the LED or photo transistor pickups. Since the arduino replacement is under way, I will not hack another mouse to get the robot working.

On a side note, cool little tip. A small web cam is a useful tool for detecting whether or not an infra-red LED is illuminated.