Author Topic: Robot Dog W.I.P  (Read 2810 times)

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Offline gary_ramsgateTopic starter

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Robot Dog W.I.P
« on: August 11, 2009, 02:45:32 PM »
Here's some photo's strung together into a video of my W.I.P

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEb9uOdNMUw[/youtube]
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Offline SmAsH

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Re: Robot Dog W.I.P
« Reply #1 on: August 11, 2009, 03:56:44 PM »
wow! that robot looks so good, i just have two questions :P
what mcu did you use as the main "brain" of the bot?
what was the stepper motor for, i understand you used encoders... did you use them with the steppers?

that robot looks excellent,
now all thats missing is information about the robot and a video of it working!
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Offline gaurav.p

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Re: Robot Dog W.I.P
« Reply #2 on: August 12, 2009, 12:19:53 AM »
woho gr8 project mahn !!looks are neat and the things used is just awesome .the robot looks are gr8 .
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Offline gary_ramsgateTopic starter

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Re: Robot Dog W.I.P
« Reply #3 on: August 12, 2009, 06:14:04 AM »
Thanks for the comments.

The main brain of the robot is a VIA EPIA Mini ITX motherboard with a EDEN processor running at 533Mhz.  £30 from ebay.
I'm booting the board from a compact flash card and using WIN98 as the OS.

I was originally going to drive the wheels using two stepper motors.  Unfortunately the motors didn't have enough torque, so I opted for two DC motors and built my own H-Bridge controller.  I may use the stepper motors to control the head of the robot (pan & tilt).  The encoders are for the two DC motors.

I've just got to the stage where I am going to write some test software to move the robot around, taking into account the encoder outputs on the two motors.   

Then I need to decide on what sensors I need.
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Offline wil.hamilton

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Re: Robot Dog W.I.P
« Reply #4 on: August 12, 2009, 08:20:44 AM »
very nice.  do you have any information on building a bot that runs off of a mini itx board?  it's something i'd like to look into.
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Offline gary_ramsgateTopic starter

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Re: Robot Dog W.I.P
« Reply #5 on: August 12, 2009, 08:49:56 AM »
I am using a Velleman K8055 USB digital/analogue board to control the motors and take feedback from the encoders.
I am also planning on using it to control a couple of stepper motors on the robots pan & tilt head.

The Mini ITX board also has a parallel port, which I will use to interface with a multiplexed AtoD to take in various inputs from whatever sensors I decide to use. 

I chose this particular motherboard because of its low power consumption, 7W when idling and 12W under 100% CPU load.
To power the board, i'm using a lead acid battery (3Ah) and a Pico 120W ATX DC-DC converter.  This requires a 12v input and gives the necessary output voltages for the motherboard.
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Offline SmAsH

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Re: Robot Dog W.I.P
« Reply #6 on: August 12, 2009, 03:32:29 PM »
bravo!
i thought you weren't using steppers with the encoders, but the pictures confused me...
what kind of objects will you need to detect? and just avoid or identify them?
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Offline dannytemmerman

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Re: Robot Dog W.I.P
« Reply #7 on: August 13, 2009, 11:14:00 AM »
Very nice robot.

What board do you use to give the sensor data to the PC?

Can you use any old PC motherboard for a robot?
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Offline ArcMan

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Re: Robot Dog W.I.P
« Reply #8 on: August 24, 2009, 09:02:03 PM »
Great robot.

But the real question on everyone's mind is...

How do you keep your workbench so clean?  Amazing!
 ;D
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