LARC Kit Builders Brag Board
This is the place where our members can tell (or show) how their project(s) are going. Sharing the glory when lots of labour results in something that actually works, and comiserating over the bumps in the road that slow you down. Please send your updates to instructor@larc.ca .
Doug Elliott VA3DAE
Although it's not really a kit, my friend Andrew Mitchell, VA3WAM, and I have been working on small robots for years. The original project was a ball-bot, which is a cylindrical robot that balances on a ball like a bowling ball, and uses wheels that touch the ball to balance and move. We soon saw that this project was quite challenging, and we backed off to a segway like bot that looks like a cereal box with wheels on the bottom of the small sides. We've been saying that we're just about at the point where it can balance itself for about a year and a half.
Here's a quick summary of current activity:
- aggregate a bunch of sub assemblies onto one motherboard to reduce the amount of cabling
(I passed an early version of this around at the Feb 17 meeting.) - build and use a battery pack to remove the need for a 12 volt umbilical cord
- design and implement a battery charging system that doesn't require dismantling the bot
- implement control and telemetry via WiFi, to remove the need for a console cable umbilical cord
- tune the balancing algorithms (“PID”) so the bot will balance without falling over
Status: we're just about at the point where it can balance itself.
More details on github: https://github.com/va3wam/SBS-MARK2
