Today I ordered some wheels for that robot that I am finally going to start and hopefully finish. I grew tired of waiting for parts and went ahead and paid for them. I have also continued to accumulate several other parts over the last year and think that I can begin a solid project with various features.

The motors are 6 mm shaft 12 Volt gear heads and if I recall correctly they are 400 to 1 ratio. In my experience its better to have a lower speed robot with a ton of torque.

The processor running the robot will be two P8X32A-Q44 running at 80 Megahertz and for programming memory I shall employ the 24LC256. The i2c bus runs up to 400Khz so boot time will be quick not that matters on this project. For extended memory I am considering a flash memory card as used in cameras or simply a Bluetooth connection to my PC. Both have issues that I need to consider before any decision is made. Since I have already designed the circuit boards the flash card option will require some trace splicing and hacking, a not so professional printed circuit board approach. The Bluetooth option is already ready on the circuit board but will need some fancy soldering that I just don't like to do. It takes a lot of time to pump the solder on each pad using a syringe and working under magnification.

The frame of the robot will be made of aluminum sheet metal that is about 8 mm thick. It has to support a fair amount of weight proportional to size so aluminum was chosen for obvious reasons. The heaviest item is the battery. I decided on a small motorcycle type battery, a non-spill sealed 12V 7.5Ah rechargeable. The size is 5.9"L x 2.6"W x 3.7"H and weights 5.6 lbs. It should give for some good run times. We shall see...