ZinZam

Electronics

A micromouse is a high power draw electro mechanical device. The high accelerations and velocities require very sharp changes in current draw which can disrupt the supply of power and needs to be counter-acted. In addition to motor drive, and power electronics, logical circuitry is required which forms the 'brain' of the micromouse.

We used an Atmel Mega16 micro controller and L293D motor H-Bridge for the core trio micromouse, but you can use any micro controller. If you are not confident in your programming ability, choose the Mega32 which is pin compatible, but has double the programme memory. If you are confident, you may want to experiment with 32-bit ARM based micro controllers to implement a more advanced controller. Of course other micro controllers can be used, just make sure you can clock it to about 10 MHz, and has at least 16 KiB of programme memory.

As mentioned before, the power electronics are of particular importance, make sure you have various sized electrolytic capacitors sitting directly on your power source, a 100µF and a 10µF capacitor in parallel works for most people. Remember to decouple the voltage supply of all your logic circuitry at the supply pin with a 1µF ceramic capacitor, they cost virtually nothing, and in surface mount take up very little room on your circuit board.