Robotics & Engineering - Week of 11/17/25
This week I spent a good portion of time milling out and working on the PCB for the Ford Think. The PCB has a TFT display for the control and battery information, along with an RFID tag scanner for authentication (to prevent unwanted sophomore operation…)
The board came out nicely, but it had a few minor issues including the fact that the board was milled over an existing hole in the PCB board, which messed up a few of the traces that needed some post-manufacturing work with some wire and precise soldering.
I then transferred everything from my working breadboard example to the PCB and soldered it all up.
Not very beautiful, and turns out, not very functional. I tested the board and the display worked fine, however, the RFID module was not connecting to the Arduino. I checked all connections with a multimeter and they all checked out, so I need to do some more digging to find the source of the problem.
Because I wanted a break from working on the PCB, I decided to pot the relay which is in charge of enabling and disabling the carts programmatically.
With the help of Tim, we made a metal enclosure that the relay to sit in while we filled it full of hot glue to make it more robust and a little more weatherproof.
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