Printed Circuit Board

A prototype for the electrical system was built on a breadboard for the five-legged designs, using NPN transistors to control the valves and diodes to handle current discharge from the valves. When scaling the design to an eight valve system, the circuit became far more fragile and began to fail more often. A printed circuit board (PCB) was designed to mitigate this problem. It attached to the Arduino as a shield, and the eight valves connected to screw terminals along the sides of the board. The Arduino and circuit were powered via the Arduino serial interface, as this was already being used to communicate with the youBot.