Dear Diary,

Today I got to work on the software for the chassis-duino. As I was working on the motor-driving part I found that the right side motor was no longer driving. Weird, I thought. Naturally the drivers were in the absolute lowest, deepest, darkest part of the chassis. So I had to dismember the whole flippering thing again to try to diagnose the problem. And, sadly, I found that the right-side DRV8833 board no longer pushes out the voltage that it's supposed to. I even pulled the left one out to compare to, and the right one shows less than half of what the left does on the multimeter.

In doing all this I was reminded again of just how loud this particular chassis is when the motors are running. I'm not sure what to compare it to, but I have power tools that are quieter. I also know that it's not really a sound I want running autonomously around the house. And if I think it's too loud and obnoxious, I'm sure my wife will really dislike it.

So, now what? I could acquire another driver board (they're only like 5 bucks at Pololu) and get full volume out of the RP5. Or I guess I could start thinking about a different chassis getup. Briefly I considered ignoring the chassis for a while and just concentrate on the arm design and testing. Then I realized how much the arm design is dictated by the chassis design. Thus the title, Argh...

Ruprecht chassis in pieces, again...