Refurbishing Robot

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

The missing parts to the TECHNOROBOT kit that I got at the explOratorium during the Stanford EPGY AI Program in 2008 have been found! This robot has been transformed many times, the first as an idea/prototype for an emotional line following robot, then a snowplow, and now it will be an XBee messenger robot!

Refurbishing it was OK, it only took 4 hours. The only thing that was drastically broken was the drive axel. To fix it, I used some Lego axels.

The robot now uses an Arduino, and is powered off of USB. The motor is driven with the Adafruit Motor Shield (I plan to add more motors to the robot someday). The motor is powered from an Adafruit mintyboost.

I broadcasted the refurbishment to the Fat Man and Circuit Girl stream, AND took a photo every 5 seconds! You can see the HD timelapse on Vimeo!

The next steps for this robot is rather short:

• Make a battery pack for the Arduino
• Attach XBee
• Mount an ultrasonic sensor, program a simple behaviour
• Transmit messages, listen to messages

Can’t wait to blog more about it!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Yay!! Tonight I worked on my new/old robot… It’s the robot with the chassis of the Stanley robot that I started making at Stanford in the summer. It has a gerabox to power two motors for front wheel drive, plus there’s a servo to “steer” the gearbox.

The cool part is that I use a Wii nunchuck to control the robot Tonight I coded in which way is which- tilted to the left/front/back/right. The tilt to the back doesn’t work very often, so I have to fix it

By this point, you’re probably wondering where the pictures are =) I can’t upload photos with this version of wordpress (and I’m too sleepy to ftp them right now), but I’ll add them in tomorrow as I’m changing my blog to WordPress 2.7 tomorrow, with a new theme ^_^ I really really really like the new theme. It’s going to be awesome!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

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!! =D

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Stuff!!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

^_^ Thanks to very kind people, I had a $200 gift certificate at Adafruit and was able to buy stuff!

• Arduino
• 2 ProtoShields
• Arduino bootloader
• Multimeter
• Boarduino
• Motor Shield
• Wave Shield

All of these are going to be extremely helpful @_@ In fact, the old multimeter broke just the other day ^^;

What’s a little cool is that the Arduino now has Italy on the back! Someone who had the Arduino at Stanford also had this style, so I guess it’s kind of cool that I had one of the Arduino Dicemilas without the map The motor shield sounds a lot of fun… as does the wave shield! I’m not sure which ones I’ll put together and test first…

Either way, I now have lots of interesting stuff to keep me entertained for a while longer

Thanks Ron & Evelyn!!!
(and I hope I won’t blow any of them up)

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.