My first self-designed circuit - though it's a bit of a stretch to call it that. I've got 12v coming into the near side of the breadboard from a NiMH battery (and I am a bad engineer for using the same colour wire for live and ground there, oops). That's being shunted through an adjustable switching regulator to provide 7.2v on the power rails on the far side.
The reason for this is I've gotten the superstructure off my new RC tank, removed the built-in RC controller and am getting close to testing it out with the motor controllers I used in the old tank. I need 12V because basically all the electronics I intend to put on the rover (Fit-PC2, Kinect, Arbotix and AX-12 servos) want that; however, unlike my old tank which ran on 9.6v and could tolerate 12, this one is based on 7.2v.
I could shunt 12v into the motor controllers (they'll take up to about that much) and rely on PWM to bring the effective voltage down to something the motor can handle without burning up - but I'm a programmer, and therefore I trust hardware more than my software, during development at least. This way there's no way I can mess up and explode my motors, and as a side effect I imagine the regulator will prevent too much EMI getting back and messing with the PC.
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