Spider's Arduino Nano

OK. So now what we're going to do is, we're going to modify our arduino nano to work with this bot. So the nano that we have has these header pins that stick out of the bottom of it, and you can see them here. And the header pins are great for connecting it to a prototyping border or bread board, but they don't provide a lot of ways for us to connect it to our particular bot. So we have these female header pin connectors and they've got a male end and a female end, so we're going to trim off just the right number of those using our nipper pliers. Once we have those trimmed off, we are going to connect the header pins from the arduino to the header pins on our female-male header pin connectors, and that will allow us to plug wires in and take them back out really easily. So it'll make it easier for us to change things out. Otherwise, we would have to solder directly to the arduino, and that could be a problem if, for some reason, we wanted to change something around. So we want to make sure that we count the exact number of pins that is sticking out of the arduino board, and we match the male-female header pin connector to the number of pins that are sticking out there. So we're going to take these pins and we're going to bend them 90 degrees with our pliers. We're going to grab our pliers and we're just going to bend those pins 90 degrees. It's really important that we do we do this carefully and that we bend them completely out 90 degrees, so that they're sticking straight out of the side. So they were sticking straight down, so we're going to make sure that we bend them completely to stick straight out the side. And you'll probably have to bend them a couple of times to get them perfectly straight and get them to line up just right, but this is going to make it a lot easier for us to connect to those male-female header socket pins, which are sitting there on the table. OK. So we're bending all these out and what we can do is, once we've got those bent out-- it's important, also, that they're all sort of bent out at the same angle. You don't want them sticking in a whole bunch of different directions. You want them all reasonably the same. So when we push this down, we can tell that there's still a little bit that we can bend those to get them perfectly horizontal. They should be at the same plane-- they should be in the same plane as the actual arduino board. So perfectly horizontal, and that'll make it a lot easier to make our solder connections with our male-female socket pin connectors, or header pin connectors that are, again, sitting on the table there. So now that we've got all that bent out, we're going to take our alligator clips, or the helping hand clips, and we're going to hold our arduino in place. Now, if you're working with a partner, you can get them to take a pliers and hold the nano in place. Just be sure when you grab the nano that you only touch the very corners, the parts that you see the little holes on. You don't want to squeeze any of the components. You see a lot of little boxes on the back there-- those are components. And if you grab those with a alligator clip or pliers, you could break them off and that means that the chip won't work the way it's supposed to-- or, the board won't work the way it's supposed to, I should say. So once you have the piece, you should have the pins from the header pin-- the male-female header pin-- connecting to the pins from your arduino. They should be flush up against the pins from the arduino. So what I'm doing now is I'm just using some spare alligator clips to make sure that those two things are squeezed tightly against one another, and then I'm going to take my soldering iron and put a little bit of solder on it, and just knock that extra solder off again. We're just tinning the tip of the soldering iron. And then I'm going to put the soldering iron right on the joint between those two things, and just put enough solder on to make sure that there's good connection. You don't want to put too much solder, because if you bridge the joint between the two pins-- in other words, if you bridge across two different connections, it'll cause some problems for you. The chip won't work the way it's supposed to. So you want to put just enough solder to connect the two, but not a whole lot more. And you can see that smoke from the flux is moving out of the way rapidly, and that's because I've got a good air flow, so I definitely recommend making sure you've got, like, a fan going or something so you don't breathe the flux. And so once you've got a number of those connected you can take that final alligator clip off. And I just saw a pin there that needed a little bit more solder, and we'll do the rest there. So now, all of those pins are connected and what we've done is-- I'm just going back through and double checking any of the other pins. This is the second side, so I did the second side the exact same way as the first side. And so that means now that we can easily swap out the two. And so I'm trimming off the excess wires. There's some wire that sticks past the solder joint. So I'm going to trim that off using the nipper pliers. And when you do this, make sure you're wearing safety glasses. Because those extra little wires can fly off, and you want to make sure you're wearing safety glasses to do that. Now, we have to make sure that the parts that we just connected don't conduct electricity to some part of the board we don't want them to. So we're going to cover over the bottom of our arduino nano with electrical tape, and we want to make sure all of those connections we just made are completely covered. Otherwise, they could rub up against some part of the motor controller or another exposed metal piece and cause a short. And that might ruin our board and we don't want that to happen. So now we're ready to connect our arduino board to our motor controller.