Yesterday I received my Chronos sport swatch from Ti. I saw a post on HackaDay about Tideals.com. At half off of the original price, I just couldn’t pass up ordering a new gadget to play with. After doing some research before I ordered it, I ended up getting the Ti LaunchPad for $4.30 as well. A MSP430 dev board. For the price, why not? Plus both included shipping. Here is the LaunchPad: And the Chronos: Now just to figure out want to do with them. I started messing with the Chronos last night and it defiantly isn’t as easy to get started as the Arduino but I am sure I will get comfortable with it after some time. I was thinking since I will be flying next week, …
Week of 08/14/2011 & 08/21/2011 – Motor Stuff
On a mission to solve this motor problem I was up late one night doing research. After some calculations and research of different motors I ended up ordering a few. The difficult thing was finding a motor that was the same size and low power requirements but having more torque than what I had. Fast forward to this week of 08/22/2011 and my motors have finally arrived. I spent the evening swapping the front two motors and testing the results before I replaced the other two. To my disappointment they seemed weaker than the originals. The next day, I decided to put the originals back in. Wow! Such a pain to end up at square one. I ended up breaking 2 tabs, one on each motor. It was frustrating. But …
Week of 08/07/2011 – Motor Problems and Other Projects
Another week has gone by without making much progress on the SBot project. My primary problem has been getting it to turn reliably. There is seemingly insufficient torque to turn with the weight even with 4 DC motors, but they are wired in parallel in sets of 2. Using the bathroom scale, my robot weighed in at a reasonable 3.8 pounds. There are ways I can turn over a distance but not within a small space which is needed for docking. After some research and posting online, it doesn’t seem that my problem is power related even though the LCD does dim when the motors start moving. Disconnecting the LCD doesn’t seem to make a difference, so I really need stronger motors. Last week after having coming …
Robot Control Web Site
Since SBot 1, I have been working on a web site to control my robot. This way any platform can control it as long as it has a browser. Eventually I may create specific apps for Android/iPhone just for the experience of mobile app development as I have not had the opportunity. I recently added forms based authencation. Before it would prompt for login. The back end uses Active Directory. This is the control site for SBot 1. You can see a tab for JBot1. That is an implementation I setup to use java to refresh the images so they are smoother but doesn’t work for mobile. Control site for Sbot 2 which doesn’t have all the controls yet. I started with the simple ASP.Net example in …
Week of 07/24/2011 and 07/31/2011
Even though this week isn’t over, I still wanted to post my current progress since during the week of July 17, most of my time was spent packing for Comic-Con in San Diego. It was an awesome trip and I will probably post pictures soon. I wasn’t able to blog about it or my robot again last week because with travelling, plus that many people at the Con, and lack of sleep, illness struck so I was out sick most of the week. So far, this week, I was able to make some progress. Me and my girlfriend have started a schedule to get us back into a weeknight routine so that we can work on projects and other to-do’s that …
Security Bot 2 Completed Pictures
After my project was posted on Hack A Day I realized I don’t have pictures of the completed build. Of course it goes it without saying that it is really never completed. Who knows what we will be added in the next year or two? Sensor ouput on LCD Right: distance sensors and brightness across the bottom. Left: camera angles and battery levels. Bottom: temperature and humidity followed but the last spoken text. View from the rear which includes the IR switches on the left and right. At the bottom is the DC jack that is connected to the charging rails underneath. The PCB from top to bottom, Xbee, Voice, Proto, Mega Left: shows the microcontroller battery and step-up. Charging dock using copper …