I finally got a chance to wire up the first of my ATMega32U4 samples (see atmel doc7766). Like all of atmel's usb chips it comes up as a bootloader. Now we get to go through the list of things that are probably broken (starting with dfu-programmer which I already know from fixing it for the at90usb647 is broken).

• dfu-programmer

It tooks some tries, but I think I'm doing pretty well at etching now.

Wanna dorkboard but afraid of surface mount?

Brian Riley at Wulfden will sell you a stripped down dorkboard kit with the reset pullup resister and the programming jumper ALREADY SOLDERED! and for another 6 bucks you can build a nifty flashlight!

http://www.1strecon.org/TheShoppe/flashlight/index.shtml

Schematic for the flashlight kit.

In preparation for making PCBs, I've created some little one-sided PCBs in Eagle.

They are:

I am fairly new to robotics/autonomous vehicles. I have a quick question; maybe someone can answer for me. I have a little Hot Wheels RC car that I had gutted all the rc components off of; I am wanting to attach my dorkboard and control the speed and direction of the motors. I have a circuit design to produce a motor controller (H Bridge)( http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Labs/DCMotorControl ), but I would like to control the speed of the motors (14mph is too fast). How will I combine motor and speed control in one circuit and then use the dorkboard to control them?