Second Generation Schematic

The first generation of the Midnight Prowlerbot used bluetooth as a means of communication directly with the Atom Bot Board (and Basic Atom Pro), while the CMUCam2+ also communicated with the Basic Atom Pro. Polling bluetooth and the CMUCam2+ slowed down robot response more than I was willing to tolerate. By the way, the CMUCam2+ would work with the Basic Atom or Basic Atom Pro at a max of 38400 baud (I38400) with the CMUCam2+ using a delay (DM 10) - no settings worked without the delay and the hardware serial port did not work.

The resulting frustration turned the robot into the schematic shown above where two Atom Bot Boards are used to basically do multithreading. The one board handled motion while the other board handled sensors and video. The two ABB boards communicated with each other using serial but with a notifier input to allow programs to avoid even checking for serial input until it was actually available.

However, a drawback of this configuration is that using the video functions requires too much experimentation during programming since it isn't possible to actually see what the camera is seeing while programming.