Last post for a week or so, moving to new location!

So we are moving into a new apartment on Tuesday, so robot building and blogging will be suspended to sometime next week, when all has settled down. Here's some more pictures of the Rover 5 project and some pictures and links.

Update: 01-11-12: Some corrections

Resistor calculator (at http://www.1728.org/)
Michaels electronics lessons

I think I am going to attach this breadboard to this
Hoist/Metal Elements frame I came up with.

Setting up a frame for attaching various stuff.

Latest shipment from Robonor.no:
2000x resistor package
200x capacitor package
10x diodes (not pictured)
Protoboard
Standoffs
Screws
20x F/F cables

So far, the main parts of the robot is:

• 4-motor Rover 5 with encoders
• Dagu 4 channel 2.5A controller (credits to Dev Donkey for good pictures of wiring and setup)
• Arduino Mega ADK with TX to an Arduino Uno R3 (slave)
• Samsung Galaxy S2 with CM9 (planning to get some pan/tilt kits to mount this as a HD camera as well using it for it's CPU power & WiFi/BT)
• Dagu AREXX IR compound eye
• Maxbotix LV EZ1 ultra sound sonar (good tutorial here) on a separate 5v circuit for minimum interference. I made a thread on the Sparkfun forum, lots of input there. Thanks guys!
• Linear temperature sensor + 2 simple temp sensors
• 16x2 LCD
• 128x64 LCD on separate 9v course (draws quite a bit of power, trying to avoid dip)
• Humidity sensor
• Dew point sensor
• 2x QRD1114 phototransistors (for rear proximity) (tutorial, same page as EZ1)
• 2x IR RX/TX transmitters
• 2x Dual channel 2A motor controllers
• Pan/tilt arm
• 2x mini breadboards, one of them mainly for buttons to control OS
• DFRobot Protoboard

Most of it has been up and running at some point, I am working on the OS to control everything. Lots of code to organize.

I'm trying to build some form of exoskeleton around
fragile parts, like the LCD. It's not that easy, considering
the pan/tilt arm has quite a bit of turning range and
will easily crash into something if the controlling code
has bugs!

Here you can see the Dagu controller mounted beneath the servo too,
as well as IR compound eyes mounted in front.

Top view. Adding more rails and brackets to further extend
mountability.

DFRobot Robot basis plates, Rover 5 mounting hacks

Adding stuff to your robot with 'nonstandard' parts.

'Builder Center - Metal Elements'

Updated 11-21-2012: Minor edits.

I've found that the Hoist sets (mentioned in earlier post) and  these ones are really useful for Arduino/DFrobot/Rover 5 units.

Some of the screws from these kits doesn't fit the basis plate, but all you have to do is to mount an angled bracket from the Hoist/BCME kits with standard DFrobot screws, and then build on the metal parts with the included Hoist/BCME screws. Just be sure that you have a bunch of standard DFRobot screw sets.

Just to give you an idea, an angled bracket (4-40) costs about a dollar at my retailer. This set includes 691 parts (not sure if it that includes the immense amount of screws and nuts as well) and costs about 35 bucks.  

But here are a huge load of beams, plates, brackets of different shapes and configurations. I was able to mount sensors, motors etc. with this kit. Go buy it, you wont regret! They have many different sets, this one with 691 parts are the biggest one they had.

I am not sure Meccano parts fit, they look like they do, but they also cost 4-6 times as much.

Click on images to enlarge!

- Professor Falken

That is a LOT of parts!

Trying out some parts on the back of the Rover

Dagu IR compound eye mounted using these kits.