MANOI’s Numerous Tune-ups

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

MANOI has been moving around lately. I’ve been bringing it from one place to another, which does have some wear and tear on the wires.

The first time I tried to bring it somewhere to show everyone, it was super cold and a lot of the wires snapped! (It didn’t work) =P

MANOI regularly has trouble with one of its servos, which is also completely annoying.

Currently, MANOI’s servos are either connected by the servo cable itself, or there are jumpers. These jumpers can be tedious at times as they can fall out, and not work. At this point, what MANOI really needs are real servo extension cables.

Thanks to a donation I received, I am ordering 7 of them! Hopefully they will be here by Friday.

I’m also trying to adjust the center of gravity again. I have to find a better way of attaching the Arduino and SSC-32 together, and then attaching that to its back.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 15th, 2008

This is my Hockey MANOI work in progress robot. It needs a lot of improvement before I actually take it outside (hopefully there won’t be snow by then). It’s using a plastic stick that I found lying around (check out the pics)

So far it’s going okay, I guess. Trying to make a robot balance with many moving parts is difficult though, and really exhausting. There’s lots of things that I’ll need to fix… The program is basically a sequence of movements:

- Forward 6 times
- Shoot 3 times
- Backward 6 times
- Shoot 3 times

The Forward and Backward movements do vary slightly, but they both result in the robot going backwards. I’m trying to think of a way to fix it that will be the best way, like attaching a few heavy rocks to the front of the robot won’t be the best way in this case. Once the robot shoots after going Backward, there’s too much movement and it falls over.

I’ll probably have an if statement in the Shoot movement asking what was the last movement. If it was backwards, the shot will be more slow and less intense so it won’t tip over.

The stick also has to be mounted better… it moves WAY too much =P (those tie wraps serve no purpose)

Despite all of the falling over, it’s fun to be trial’ing and error’ing to see how the robot can balance And it’s working off of an Arduino! I plan to add the Wave Shield, with some hockey sounds/songs that MANOI can play — there will also be a FSR on the stick so the robot will know if it should shoot or not ^_^

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.