Hello.

One of the things that people asked about most with our old version of the robot is: "How do you charge it?", "It would be cool if they could connect themselves to the charger." With these comments in mind we added special 'on the fly' charging capabilities to V3.0 on top of a more typical connector for charging. This takes the form of the upright single header and metallic sliding points in contact with the floor. (Many people mistook the upright pin as an antenna it seems). Till now we had not bothered finishing off the robots properly so that this feature works, so here is a run down of what to do to enable on the fly charging.

First cut around 3cm of wire, tin a short amount on one end then remove the sleeving. You should then solder the tinned end into one of the grounded vias at the front of the robot (on the connector end).

Bend the end of the wire around in a loop under the battery, we want to make sure there is plenty of wire surface area available for the copper tape. Fraying the wire probably is best here, I did not think about that at the time, it will lessen the bump under the tape and give more area for the connection.

Cut a short piece of copper shielding tape, it should be the kind with conductive adhesive. I got a role that is 25mm wide, which is perfect. I cut around 15mm off. Cut two slits into the tape in one end and clip the end off the resulting 'tongue'. See below, the flap in the middle is to allow the downward facing reflectivity sensor to see the floor.

Stick the tape the the bottom of the robot. It is quite hard to do this neatly but it should not really matter. The robots slide around on their motors, so it would be good if that section is smooth and even.

Now all you need to do is to supply 5v to the upright pin and ground the tape on the bottom. I knocked up a cardboard rig to charge multiple robots at the same time. 1mm copper wire across the top, the same copper tape on the bottom. Connect to a 5v source and BOOM! we have ourselves a very tiny refuelling station.

I would not reccomend this exact lay out, as a new robot joins it depresses the copper wire, disconnection all the other robots. I am thinking that the next version will have individual overhead bars so they do not interfere with each other.