Your current project has hit a wall ... The circuit is based around this Sputnik-looking standalone IR temperature sensor which, as [MakeFunStuff] aptly describes, is “a single-pixel infrared ...

The miniscule size of this self-balancing robot makes it a cool project ... and a gyroscopic sensor. This has neither. The black PCB seen to the right of the robot is an IR reflectance sensor.

The microcontroller-based concept was chosen because I wanted to scale the sensor system later to suit other applications. Here is the diagram of my Arduino infrared close proximity sensor. As you can ...