On the right hand side of the photo is the ‘test bed’ that I use for robot programming. It consists of an Arduino and a couple of breadboards. The support platform is ‘Getting Started with Processing’ but any book of similar size and weight will do. : - )

The test bed saves me the trouble of having to move the ATMega328 microcontroller chip back and forth from the Arduino to the robot breadboard every time I want to test the programming. With the test bed, I can run program changes and monitor microcontroller behavior through the serial monitor and the blinking of the LEDs.

When I’ve completed the testing, I move the chip over to the robot. In theory, since everything worked fine on the test bed, it should work fine on the robot too.

Well, it doesn’t.

*Sigh*