14 Nov 08 The Robot: A body, Sensors and Good Progress

Progress is going really well and I’m happy so far. Unfortunately I didn’t want to show the body yet as it is so far from finished but as I haven’t posted an update in a while I decided to just go with it.

Front

Head

The body is ever so slightly lop sided by a few mm here and there which is a shame however from a short distance you wouldn’t notice, it stands up straight and weight distribution is equal throughout the base plate so I’m happy with it. Ok, ‘professionally’ the body’s a mess however for my zero experience in that kind of work, I’m reasonably happy.

This is the front of it, top is a mounted webcam, to the left of that is a phidgets temperature sensor and top right is a phidgets light sensor. I am waiting to add 8 colored status LEDs around a small flat panel 5v stereo speaker as a ‘mouth’ (I got it from a Nokia phone bundle).
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Tags: battery pack, distance sensor, IR remotes, irda, LED, light sensor, Linux, Linux robot, MAX232, motor controller, nimh, phidget, phidgets sensor, picolcd, picopsu, polycarbonate glue, sabertooth, serial port, stereo speaker, temperature sensor, the robot, usb phidgets, usb sensor kit, webcam

10 Nov 08 The Robot: More good progress

Some more hardware has arrived! Very compact USB hub with external power input, Startech USB sound adapter (line out/mic), 4Gb USB mass storage, USB Trust Webcam.

All plug and play, all works out of the box. I’m using Alsa to drive the USB sound adapter, and v4l for the webcam. Works great and the majority of the hardware works.

Now I haven’t added any pictures to this entry, as I don’t think there’s much point in looking at more pictures of a messy table! I hope that my next post will include pictures of a (reasonably) cool acrylic body. I’m still waiting for the acrylic sheets to arrive though.

The two remaining parts of the hardware to get working are wheel movement and power/battery.

With all board hardware working excluding motors, we’re on 12V/600-700mA which I think is pretty fantastic.

I’m going to go for a NiMH battery pack (12V/10Ah) and not plan to generally discharge more than 12V/2A. The motors will realistically be in use rarely as it’ll be making short slow and unfrequent movements, rather than racing around at full speed!

The battery pack will connect directly to both motor controllers, as well as to a PICOPSU and then to the board.

So.. next stage is to get all the hardware off the table and into some acrylic casing with a 12V DC power source. Once that’s done I can look further into the motors and battery!

Tags: acrylic, alsa, Linux, Linux robot, nimh, usb sound, v4l, webcam