Following on from being asked to attend some events in March, I decided to create a new robot and showcase some of what I do. This was also a way to see how hard it would be to produce an interesting robot kit. I have always liked robots that can change their configuration to either navigate through obstacles or be able to change their height and angle. So with that in mind I spent the last week designing and building the robot in the pictures.
I have been thinking about a 6 servo design for a while, so I ordered some parts I needed and put to paper my design ready to start when the parts arrived.
This design used the servos almost entirely as the chassis, and also allowed for a 4 wheel steering model as well as the more traditional differential (tank) steering.
The combinations possible with this many servos are many.
Programming such a configuration was something I really wanted to create to allow the best control possible.
Using an aluminium floor strip and matt black perspex I created an upper body for the robot, mounted on a perspex base plate.
The perspex sides and front were attached with right angle brackets to the aluminium base, I also some used some old meccano pieces to hold things together.
One assembled I worked out where the wiring would need to go and where the power source and controller would be mounted.
I wanted to use a new servo and motor controller board for this raspberry PI powered robot. This was a new design from a friend of mine, and I had promised to test and evaluate it on one of my robots.
I configured the drivers for the board and ensured the operating system of the PI was on the network I would using for ease of programming later. As I would be running the PI headless.
My motors were rated for up to 12v, but I wanted to use a 2S Lipo as a power supply as I had some of them not being used. So I intended to run the robot at around 7v.
Next I fitted 2 strips of neopixels that I placed behind dark perspex at the front of the robot.
Then I went on to programming and apart from finding I had a bad Servo which needed replacing. After a few hours I had a 4 wheel steering height adjusting robot.
This was great fun to build and it took me about 3 days to get this far. Next I want to get some good programming done with it, and add some sensors so I can explore using this robot in an autonomous way.