I've been rather busy lately, and haven't really had time to work on any projects... at least not any that I am willing to talk about. So since its been a while since I last made a post, I thought I would details some of the small mods I have made to my RS Media that I haven't previously mentioned.

Unlike my other mods, these ones are not socketed. So the pieces are now all hot glued together (I love my hot glue gun) to prevent tension on the wiring and to aid assembly.

First I added a reset button. It's connected to the unused button location on the bottom left of the main board, below the two variable resistors. I'm not really sure that this is supposed to be a reset, but it works. Pressing the button happily resets the entire robot.

Next up I added an external point to connect a USB->Serial dongle to the serial console. This has several advantages over the bluetooth link, interference is not an issue, and I can just power the media board without actually having to power up the entire robot. As you can see, the connections on the media board for the serial console are getting a little crowded.

Finally I added these. The switch block connects to the jumper pads on the bottom of the media board, and allows me to change the boot mode without having to crack him open and pull out my soldering iron.

The jumper above the block is a second reset, it connects to the unpopulated header labeled J1, on the bottom left of the media board, just bellow the SD card socket. Unlike the other reset, it only resets the media board. I would have used another push button, but I don't actually have any spare at the moment.

At some point, I'm planning on adding a block of headers that connect to the unused GPIO pins on the media board, assuming I ever have some free time again...