$50 Robot first power on question

[walkercreations]

Tomorrow I will be applying power to my $50 robot for the first time and I was hoping someone could tell me what I should be expecting when the power is applied under ideal conditions. Does the LED light up or what should I look for?

[VegaObscura]

Expect it not to work.  Expecting your first board to work the first time you power it up is like expecting to get a hole in one the first time you play golf.

Even in an ideal condition, if you've never turned it on it shouldn't do anything, because it still needs to be programmed.  Once you program it, it should (ideally) do whatever you programmed it to do.

[walkercreations]

So then what is the LED for?

[VegaObscura]

The LED will come on if you program it to come on.  It will not come on as soon as you power up.

[Soeren]

Hi,

Tomorrow I will be applying power to my $50 robot for the first time and I was hoping someone could tell me what I should be expecting when the power is applied under ideal conditions. Does the LED light up or what should I look for?

You really need to remove the controller chip before you apply power. Then you need to measure that the voltage on the Vdd-pin is correct (Atmel erroneously call this pin Vcc IIRC).

You shouldn't plug in the controller until you are certain that it gets the correct voltage!

[walkercreations]

This morning I first applied 9V to the 5V regulator side because that is the side that feeds the MCU according to the schematic I used and everything checked out beautifully. I then applied 11.1V and again everything normal. No smoke and no fire. Mission accomplished. I do still have to put power to the 4AA side to see how that goes but I'm almost 100% sure it will be all systems go.