Videos of delivery guys gone wild may be viral these days, but Santa Zero was good to me and delivered these presents intact and on time. They will help in making my cheapbot kit a reality.

I’ve only just browsed the Arduino Internals book, but it looks like it contains a lot of useful information.

The mini breadboards come from Sparkfun for just $3.95 and conveniently are just the right size to fit between the headers of the Arduino. The Hacktronics flexible jumper wires cost about $10 what with shipping and handling added onto the price for a set of 100.

I’ve read that soldering requirements will cut sales of kits by 99%, so including a mini breadboard and jumpers for my robotics kit package is the way to go. Cheapbot is going to look different after this!

And so let us begin.

First, to review, here’s what the bot used to look like:

Note there wasn’t enough room to comfortably fit the breadboard and the arduino together on the robot chassis. But now . . .

I will have to make some kind of support-tray-holder for the breadboard, but for now this works fine.

And with a mini breadboard to join jumpers in a T, I no longer need this soldering kludge:

To think of all the time and trepidation I spent on dreading the task of soldering this thing! Well, now I don’t have to do any soldering for my kit, and as mentioned, 99% of potential buyers weren’t going to do it either.

BTW, I tilted the phototransistor back, and it made a HUGE difference in the responsiveness to the flashlight, as seen in this video:

(And another BTW: the loose red flexi-jumper that moves in the video is for the nine volt battery positive terminal to connect to the arduino Vin for running the robot independently on battery power. It will be connected when I run the robot on the floor, but by leaving it disconnected now I save on battery charge.)