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.

More Rover 5 building

Got some new parts today from Robonor: (ty for quick shipping!)

* 9V to barrel adapters
* Breadboard buttons
* 10 and 50mm standoffs
* Breadboard cables
* Breadboard

Now I can mount both my Uno and Mega with separate breadboards on the Rover 5, and power them both from 9V, as well as having the built-in separate battery pack for the Rover. With two breadboards, I can now add more buttons and sensors too :)

The previous version of my Rover OS used a potmeter for menu selection, so this will make it a lot easier.

Now I just need to wait for some supplies from Robosavvy in the UK....

1 x IR compound eye 

1 x Dagu - 4 Channel DC Motor Controller with Encoder Support 

2 x SparkFun - Optical Detector / Phototransistor - QRD1114

....which should be here in around 2 weeks or so :) Then the Rover will actually be able to run!

Mean while, I have a ton of literally screwing around to do to get the optimal design and layout.

Plans for dual controller Rover5

So this is how I plan to wire the 2x dual motor controllers. It might not work, still discussing this on forum.sparkfun.com. No one has replied yet :/

I am using two of these with an Uno, which should be fine since I'm not going to do step counting.

DFRobot 4.8-46V, 2A Dual Motor Controller

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

Robot hobbyist laboratory

Heres's some pics of my new lab. Had to make a fitting space to build the robot !

Laptop dedicated to Arduino, with appropiate tools.
Multimeter, soldering, and about anything else need  to tinker!

Assembling Rover 5

Rover5 inside view, 6xAA battery pack and steppers

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

• Sparkfun Inventor's Kit for Arduino
• Arduino Beginner Tool Kit Robonor (Soldering kit)
• Digital Multimeter Electrical Meter DT 9205A
• Battery pack - 4xAA
• Serial Enabled 16x2 LCD - Black on Green 5V

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