Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 12th, 2008

My Friday night robotics are BACK! Throughout the week I was working on speech recognition… Friday I took a bit of a break and soldered up the Motor Shield!
The Motor Shield is pretty awesome since it has 2 H-bridges. Soldering it up was pretty fun- even with a melted soldering iron!

Once it was all soldered up… I first tried the servos. Their motion is so much stronger than the servos I’m using in BubbleBoy! I’m going to try to use ServoTimer library on BubbleBoy again (previous attempts have been extremely frustrating). Maybe he’ll be more “emo”

The DC motors scared me as I extremely didn’t expect them to work the first time! Which is sort of ironic because, even though they did work, I didn’t have them plugged in right, so they didn’t move backwards. The solution was to not over-think it, and just plug it in (Like below)

The motors went to the GearBox, externally powered with +3V. The batteries were slowly fading away, so it became kinda fun to spin the gears

I made a video of my fingers spinning the gears (rofl):

So yeah… this is great! I’m probably going to make a shield for a RBBB to attach the motor sheild. Or something like that. I need to get one of those rechargable batteries wrapped in lime green shrink wrap as all of the motors will be powered. (There’s 4 of them!) It’s going to be a really powerful robot O_O

Oh yeah! I’m not sure what I did to my camera *coughdroppeditcough* but it takes REALLY nice pictures now… it does the effect that I’ve been trying to achieve on macro for ages now- softens the background a lot, crisp in the front (you can see it in the soldering iron pic). Yay!!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.
Tags: Arduino, dc motors, motor shield, photography, robotics, servos

One Response to “Friday Night Robotics”

1. Ron Says:
   September 13th, 2008 at 8:13 AM

   Yea, those H-bridges are pretty cool. Be cautious of the L293s as they have a 600mA current limit, I think. They should drive those smaller motors fine, but if you want to drive bigger stuff look for chips like the L298, which can handle a lot of current and cost about $3 a chip. Once you feel more comfortable working the the H-bridges you can just get the chips & don’t have to pay for the whole board (though having the power and motor connectors on the board is nice).

   P.S. We’re going to have to get you a new soldering iron. That one has bit the dust. Is the tip replaceable? That thing must be horrible to work with.

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