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Showing posts with label robots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label robots. Show all posts

11/3/12

Rover 5 with pan-tilt kit,breadboard and 2 servos mounted

Some more pictures of mounting a pan tilt kit on a Rover 5.

The robot chassis base plate is on a 50 mm standoff to utilize the mounting holes for a servo instead of getting a second multi-purpose bracket. Saw this on a YouTube vid. Follow the "0.1 assembly guide" that comes with the kit (and is the only one produced) as far as you can get without fastening things much, then take a look here if you need. I had to google pretty hard to find some pictures and a short video snippet, but it's out there. The kit also does not come with enough screws to mount it this way. You are supposed to get an extra MP-bracket, they come with the screws too.

HERE is the images I can find. The ones you can see on this page are my own.

These are not mentioned in the assembly instructions
and many people seek help for this kit, but it's supposedly
agreed on that this is how you do it.

Then, on the multi+bracket, put them in like this.
This will fit quite nicely. Not so much with the U-bracket.
Make sure you don't fasten the center screw until the
servo is centered. Then you can take it off, and re-position it.
Here you can also see the positions for mounting
the Arduino base plate (here with Mega ADK and breadboard)
Make sure then, that you can twist it as much as you want in each direction
Try it out. When assembling, keep using two screws to
test out that you can rotate (slowly!) the servos
The standard servos goes up to about 150 degrees
from the data sheet, but mine almost does 170 or so it seems.

Then fasten center screw

I found that there are two holes drilled in the base plate and they
actually fit quite nicely on the Rover like this.
I found some slightly thinner stand-offs from a
computer with long screw length and short stand-off length
that went nicely trough the holes after trying first with
thinner screws. (the pointy ones, I just randomly picked it from
an old computer as well)
Before the camera was out of power, I didn't get to
take a picture of how i stabilized it completely. I'll post that later. There was
a hole quite far to the left that I put in an M3 standoff with a screw
in and put on the nut. It then just sled into the outer ridge under the
breadboard. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be done this way
but it worked well for me.
Two 9V batteries, supposed to be taped in here
on opposite side of the breadboard to counter weight.
The 6xAA battery pack also helps putting
center of weight down a bit. 

10/24/12

Update on Rover 5 project

Got some new wires, a "Helping Hand" and a 2A motor controller today. Which means I have the parts I need to get the Rover running on all 4 motors according to Robonor.no who recommended these two. I am going to need to get a some standoffs and screws to mount the Arduino and the two motor controllers. Here's some pic for today:
Rover5 with top plate mounted. I have no idea if i did this the right
way, but atleast it sits there. I have no idea how one are supposed to
get a servo motor in that hole, the battery pack is impossible to get
far enough down.

2A motor controller already hooked with the needed wires
Pan&tilt kit
Helping Hand, Comes prebuilt, very... handy..

Sortiment of screws and standoffs




10/10/12

Arduino robot project

10/10/12


With the helpful guys at Robonor.no, I've ordered the following parts for my project:
Arrived in the mail today, UNO R3 from Robonor

Dagu 4 motor controller is on it's way from England!

I will eventually get the Rover5 4-engined robot, but as the Dagu controller card is hard to get, I have to put this on hold for a while. At the moment, I will have enough to do by going trough the basics! When the Rover is in place, I will get an Mega ADK board for my Android phone to utilize all the sensors.



I have ordered the Dagu controller from the UK along with an IR compund eye from RoboSavvy. I'll slip right under the 20 pound tax limit! This could take a cool 2 months 4 weeks though. (Seems he could speed it up a bit!?

Meanwhile,I'll get to program the Arduino controller and hooking up the LCD display.
Fun times!
Serial Enabled 16x2 LCD - Black on Green 5V

11/10/12


Got an old laptop from a friend for fixing his new one and installing games and a 'safe' browsing environment. Not too bad either, Dual core AMD Turion with 2 gigs and 256 mb shared gfx memory. Will probably install XP in this to use all the easily available Arduino tools, and run Linux in a VM to run electronics software.

Postal service reports that the package has been received and will probably end up here tomorrow afternoon :)

13/10/12



Picked up package today, everything was included as far as I can tell, except the 3-pin serial LCD, but i actually got a much better LCD with a mounted backpack, so this should be a serious upgrade! Thanks Robonor! Quick delivery too!


Graphic LCD Serial Backpack


Serial Graphic LCD 128x64

First testing footage

From the Circ-02 tutorial with 8 leds

Well, cannot complain, everything worked as expected!

14/10/12



Some connectors was badly soldered from the factory. Fixed that and now it should work. Pixels was all over the screen.



Some error in the manual it seems. It won't work from the 5.5v line, have to use Vin. Here you can see the Sparkfun icon!

Some software I probably need:
http://www.atmel.com/tools/AVR32STUDIO2_6.aspx