HD Bot lives! (Well sort of.....)

Archive
1

All of the recent robot talk has rekindled my interest in personal robotics. I found the pieces of a little robot I made many, many years ago that used a Basic Stamp 1 for brains (I still have the stamp too!) Originally, I used old CDs braced by small bits of wood for a chassis. Later on I salvaged some 5.25" hard drive platters but never reassembled it once I had the platters all machined. I popped it back together this morning and stuck a Domino on top to show the scale.

It uses two modified hobby servos attached to model airplane wheels and a single airplane tail wheel. I’ll have to find a way to mount the Domino now and build some connectors for the servos and see if I can make it move with a much more modern and powerful board than the old BS1.

Uploading images seems to be broken? Well, it let me add it when I edited the post, strange…

2

Yeah, you talked about this in the chat. Very neat to see an old project get resurrected with recent hardware. Can’t wait to see photos!

3

I have such a chassis laying around. Bought it a long time ago. I could replace the PCB with the electronics by hard drive platters. Looks neat!

Edit: how about this? :smiley:

4

Is this like 10 robot we have around…this is freakin’ awesome! :dance:

5

I just pulled out the old BS1, what a hoot. Check out my nifty home-made IR collision detection sensor. It could detect which side of the bot was closer to an obstacle.

6

Hard drive platters? That is epic!

7

I still find this very smart! I can trip my pro bot which I still have somewhere around, add hard drive platters instead of PCB and I can build a new robot. ::slight_smile:

So less time, so much ideas ::slight_smile:

8

Here is a short video of HD bot doing donuts. I was just testing to find out where the center point, dead-stop, position was for each servo. I have it running from two separate battery packs, a 4-AA cell pack for the servos and a 7.4V lithium pack for the Domino. If the 5V DC-DC converter I had laying around would have run with a 7.4V input I would have everything running from the lithium pack.

[url]HDbot Lives - YouTube

9

Was that Tango dancing? :slight_smile: Nice video

When will we have a balancing robot? [url]Inverted Pendulum Balancing Robot Montage - YouTube

I want to make one but I do not know how

10

That is very cool Gus,

When you donate me Razor IMU, i’m happy to build something like this :whistle:

:stuck_out_tongue: : :dance: :think:

11

Very nice chassis Jeff. Now the real fun begins huh :>

12

Would NETMF be able to run a balance bot? I think you have to have ultra fast timing to do that.

13

I doubt NETMF can’t do it…if slow and very limited NXT can do ti then FEZ can do 10 of them I think [url]LEGO Mindstorms NXTway-G Balancing Robot - YouTube

Maybe I am wrong?

14

Yeah we have on in the club that runs on a basic stamp 2. I can add this to my list to do at some point just have to finish the competition robots first.

15

I see. Well, I might try to attempt it then, after RWAR is at a pausing stage.

16

Here is the sensor: [url]http://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044[/url]

Seems to be pretty easy to use, just outputs an analog voltage. Since it is designed for the Lego NXT there is not a lot of technical detail on that. From their build instructions it looks like the NXT brick uses RJ45 connectors so it should not be too hard to interface with…scratch that they are a funky RJ12 type connector.

Here is one source for the connectors I just found: [url]http://www.mindsensors.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=67[/url]. It hacks me off when a company chooses to use some screwy proprietary connectors to try and force people to buy stuff from only them.

Information on connector pin-out: [url]http://www.josepino.com/projects/hacking_lego_nxt[/url] and [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_NXT[/url]

The NXT stuff might be an interesting source of low cost sensors and since the FEZs can speak I2C the digital sensors should be fair game too.