You can also read the Vivus the Robot Instructable if you prefer that instead.

I had to take apart my own Vivus, and rebuild it from scratch to get all the images. It took a looooooong time, so enjoy every picture.

Happy robot building!

I think we forgot to solder in the off switch…

I’m by no means an expert, but all the same I have a bit of advice for the beginner robotics hobbyist.

I recommend that if you go the book route you avoid most of the “Build a bot” titles. I got the most out of books and manuals on the microcontrollers I was using. The 3 picaxe manuals rock and are free (available at picaxe.co.uk) and I hear that there’s a great Arduino book out, but I haven’t had the chance to use any Arduinos yet (namely due to cost).

MAKE (makezine.com) has some great stuff on Arduinos in their blog and video series called “How-to Tuesdays”.

Here’s what I recommend: start with a cheap picaxe (don’t forget the motor driver chip!) and figure out how to get the wheels to move with the online manuals. Then, add a bumper switch and move on from there!

If you feel to afraid to even do that, then you should probobably go with the “have your hand held” route and follow a tutorial or buy a kit. If you do buy a kit, please, for the love of all that is good, do not buy a Lego NXT. They are drastically overpriced and won’t teach you nearly as much as others. I enjoyed my experience with VEX hardware, but their microcontroller ($50!) drove me absolutely crazy. You could, of course, get the brand-new ever-so-popular Vivus the Robot kit from the BW Science Labs Store.**

Footnotes:

*: called my brother
**: I really don’t want to toot my own horn, but the reason why I’m selling this kit is because I’ve found its good for beginners.

Vivus the GoBot has been under development for a long time. I chose to use the picaxe axe023 microcontroller board because it was low cost and small. The geared motors I used were very frustrating to assemble as it was made of lots of tiny pieces with little instruction on assembly. However, they had a good gear ratio and were very low cost considering the alternatives (pricing $15 for one little motor should be a crime!). I would have liked to use different bumper switches, but the Omerons were the only ones I could buy and were cheap, they actually ended up working really well. I used a 6v power supply which was heavy, but also great because I ended up not needing to solder in a voltage regulator. I would have liked to add two more wheels, but refrained from doing so because of the cost ($4.95 for 2 wheels?!). I used two tongue depressors as a chassis as they ended up being nearly the perfect size. I tried to accomplish this project without soldering because I don’t have good ventilation and my respirator broke. However, this paid off big time as I would easily reconfigure wires in 1/3 of the time it would have taken me if I had soldered the joints.

Anyone who has ever attempted to build a robot from scratch know the challenges it presents, often time resulting in failure if one tiny thing goes wrong like using a different transistor than you should or accidently giving your bot one volt too many (Both of these mistakes I have made during other attempts). This is by far my best robot, and its nice to know that its possible after failing so many times.

By far the hardest part was coding Vivus. The picaxe microcontroller runs on BASIC code, which was created in the late 60′s. I spent at least 4 hours testing tons of code bit by bit to get it to finally work.

And of course, every cool robot needs its own cool movie.

Or watch Vivus the GoBot DIY Robot directly on YouTube.

Speedy is a fun and simple bristle bot that I built from parts that I had lying around the house. I make the chassis from scrap metal that I had, and I shaped it using my diamond cutter. This was perhaps the most dangerous part, as cutting through sheet metal in your room isn’t usually a good idea, however if the proper safety measures are taken there’s no risk.

I got the motor from my brother’s Xbox controller, as he is yet to discover. Working with the motor was extremely frustrating because it has very short, thin wires that left no margin for error. It was also too powerful, as often times the enormous vibrations used to move the bristle bot would loosen the hot glue that held it down.

I soldered the motor and the power supply to a switch. I’ve seen and read enough MAKE tutorials to know how to solder properly, and fortunately I have a bit of experience with a soldering gun. The first contact point went smoothly, however the second point took me forever to get right, and the vibrations would keep loosening it until the point it would break off. I finally decided to solder it and then wrap the connection point in hot glue to prevent short-circuiting and disconnection.

I attached all of the parts using hot glue and double-sided foam tape, and added a flashing blue, yellow, and green light display at the front to give it a cooler look (especially when its on in the dark).

I actually spent more time troubleshooting then I did building, which is always frustrating.

This isn’t my most applicable robot, but I suppose it could clean some floors before I take it apart or it drives its self off of a table one foot too high.

Brennon