Rover II – Mobility

Was a long wait for shaft couplers and mounting hardware, but it's in and mounted. Rover II has it's feet. Gave it a very brief road test and it rolls, but will need to construct the bumper before any serious seaworthiness testing can start. Encoder Covers Update (2018-04-12): The above shows the two 3D printed…

Rover II – Components Layout

Made decent progress with the actual sensor layout. Still have lots to do, of course. Really loving working with the Sintra. I had to reorder the 3mm-4mm couplers this morning. My bad. I did some messy metric to imperial conversion. On the bright side, I did find a new vendor (ServoCity) that has exactly what…

Rover II – Concept Update

Changes: * relocated Pi's battery to undercarriage * corrected dimensions for ultrasonic and IR sensors * showing IR in "table edge seeking" position * updated bumper for larger catchment * relocated motor controllers to left/right from fore/aft * added PCB where connections will reside * hard to see but opened a window above Pi to…

Rover II – Long Range Sensors

Finally cutting plastic (Sintra). Tier One laminated and working on the sensor array.     

Rover II

OK., decision made... No more toy motors and fighting to get makeshift encoders working. Bought four FIT0483's from DigiKey they should be in tomorrow. Society of Robots helped with the selection. Not a cheap solution but a workable one. Started working on the concept for Rover II. Three Tiers. Bottom tier is for batteries and motor…

I can see clearly now…

Taking a break from motor encoders today, and working on my three proximity sensors. Ultrasonic was a simple one to implement, but I've yet to determine its capabilities with respect to how narrow the "beam" is. The laser one seems pretty accurate and of course has a very narrow scope. The infrared sensor was fun, because it returns an analog voltage.…

Rover 0.9

(Update - May 2018) Well... Today I had Rover operating (somewhat) reliably. I've done a major re-write of the state machine that seems much more readable, reliable, and scalable. The bumpers were being read, the motors were behaving correctly, and the encoders were almost up to snuff. in short, it bounced off the walls, corrected it's…

The Grand Plan

The following was my grand plan, as I started into my exploration (NPI) of robotics… An Autonomous Mining Collective The objective is to build a multi-robot unit to explore new landscape, discover, and recover valuable materials. My grander idea is to, eventually, get others involved in contributing to this enterprise. To take a collaborative approach…

Rover (nee Explorer) 0.7

First robot is getting a rename. Partially due to the realization that you can't really explore with out mapping capability. No biggie, but this will take a little time. My thought is to go with having the Arduino send vector data to the Raspberry Pi. I found some useful info to help me build maps on a…

Explorer 0.49

98% of the hardware is now complete. SOFTWARE TIME!!!