DIY Navigation Robot
Saturday, August 15, 2009 5:14Seeing that this is the 100th post on BW Science labs I thought that merited a really cool post. BW Science Labs now has a mascot named Vivus the GoBot.
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.
7 Responses to “DIY Navigation Robot”
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Anonymous says:
August 15th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Dude!
This is so awesome. Loved the Star Wars intro and text and your GoBot looks very cool also. How hard was this to program?
Keep up the good work!
BostonDude
Daniel says:
August 16th, 2009 at 3:47 am
It looks great, far beyond anything I could build. The intro was very well put together.
Brennon says:
August 16th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Programming it was the hardest part as I haven't written any Basic in over a year.
Granddad Dawson says:
August 21st, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Fantastic!! Creative! I'm proud of you!
Jack says:
October 15th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
I haven't had a chance to pore over your blog yet, but do you have any recommendations for someone just starting out in robotics and electronics? What books or websites do you think are indispensable yet accessible to the novice robot tinkerer? If you have already posted something on this, could I get a link?
The "robot" I made when I was a kid was made out of cardboard boxes and Christmas lights. I've gotten a bit more ambitious since then.
Jake says:
January 21st, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Hi i just ordered the kit for this robot and have been reading over the instructions do you think that you could post a video of you assembling the motor i think it would be easier for me to understand thanks!
sciguy77 says:
January 23rd, 2010 at 12:15 am
Hi Jake,
The motor box is certainly one of the more difficult parts. I’ve been wanting to do a video tutorial for it for a while, but there’s a time issue (I’m writing a column for Servo magazine, and my deadline is in a few days), though I’ll do my best.
If you have any specific ping me at store[at]bwsciencelabs.com.