Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about completely redesigning the Fun With Robots platform. New chassis, new board, everything. I’m going to redesign it to make it more versatile. Giving it more features and greater capabilities.
I’m calling this new platform “Jasper” and designing it around the old platform plus an additional feature set. Jasper will have similar features and functionality to the FWR 2 platform, which is based on the Firefly board. In addition to those base features, the Jasper platform will have expandable capabilities. It will be able to use add-on boards similar to the Arduino Shields. The first big add-on I’m looking to add is optional encoders and then maybe wireless and LCD add-ons.
After that the possibilities are endless. I would also like to rework the curriculum some and maybe market it to other colleges and maybe even highschools. All in all it will be nice to get a new platform out, and it would be great if we could get other institutions to use it. Expect to hear more about it in the near future.
Last Friday I spent a decent amount of time working on the mobot for this year. I was able to get the chassis mostly complete. I need to mount the electronics and I still need to build the sensor array. But other than that, construction is mostly complete. I would really like to add a cover over it (in the case that it would rain on race day) using vacu-formed plastic. The robotics club has a vacu-former, so I’ll probably give it an attempt.
I still need to finish some soldering for the sensors, but, for the most part, I’m done. Here are some pictures:
Last night we we3re able to complete our dynamics project. Barring any significant failures in testing the device, we won’t be making any additional changed to it.
We rectified all of the issues that we discovered in our first design review. We lacked all of the controls that we needed as well as having some stability issues. We added a control bar and fixed up the sliding mechanism. The mechanism works basically perfectly.
I will be building DR1 in phases. In the first phase I will build the motion and sensing and control parts. Once I have them working I will add the LCD and wireless capabilities. Right now I have 4 unused I/O pins on the arduino (2 digital, 2 analog), so I have some room for expansion. I may add a camera in the future.
I’ve been thinking about building a small robot that would be able to navigate around on the top of a desktop (hence the name Desk Rover). This robot would be approximately 3in x 3in x 3in. The robot is going to be used to do a lot of things I’ve never done before. Such as wireless and using an LCD. Additionally, I’ve never designed a robot just for me before, and it’s something I would like to do. I would like the design to be fairly versatile in terms of sensors and capabilities. I might also build a few of them to have them work together, or just upgrade the design as I move from one iteration to the next.
The features of the first Desk Rover include cliff sensors, range finders, LCD, wireless communication (via Xbee) as well as possibly encoders on the wheels. I plan on controlling Desk Rover with an Arduino Nano and eventually I may design my own boards to make the design more compact.
Here some sketchhes of the proposed layout of Desk Rover, in theses sketches I was thinking about using the GM 6, but I may end up using micro-metal gear motors from Pololu instead. I have a few configuration options which I may explore as the design progresses through iterations.
I’ve started thinking about a design for a new Fun With Robots board. The current board (Firefly 1.0 by Botrics) has a serial connection, built in motor driver, 2 buttons, potentiometer, tricolor LED and a buzzer. I’ve created an updated version of the Firefly that replaces the serial connection with a USB connection.
My board, dubbed FWRv1 will have an upgraded feature set, some of which are based on what is rumored to be in the Firefly 2 board. We are currently unsure when the Firefly 2 board will become available, and it will be easier for us to maintain our own boards for the future of the class.
Thus far the feature set I am aiming for in this board is very similar to the Firefly (2 buttons, tricolor LED, potentiometer, buzzer and built in motor driver) plus some additional features. These additional features include things like USB connection (instead of serial), possible recharging of batteries via USB, additional I/O and the possibility of adding an LCD (which would require the additional added I/O).
Right now I’m planning on using either the Atmel Atmega32, the Atmega640 or the Atmega1281. The Atmega1281 would have the additional required I/O for driving and LCD on its own. Otherwise, the Atmega32 or Atmega640 could drive a serial enabled LCD as well as provide additional I/O ports.
Or, I may not actually upgrade the processor. Instead I may take away some servo ports and use them instead for a serial enabled LCD. Another option may be to contact Botrics to get the information (schematic/board design) of the Firefly 2.
Finishing the Firefly 2 would most likely be the easiest option and would allow me to focus my efforts elsewhere.
Believe it or not, it didn’t take me, a Mechanical Engineer no less, very long to swap out the serial chip for a USB one. The USB one required some additional lovin’. Meaning I had to add a capacitor to the board, but, given that a mini-USB port is much smaller than a serial port, I had plenty of room to spare. Now I need to get someone who knows what they’re actually doing to look at it to make sure it makes sense.
Depending on what they say I might make a few changes. I might make a few additional revisions anyway. Even if I’m “done” changing the boards design, I still have quite a bit of work to do. I still need to actually build one to make sure it works and I will need to take the current library for the board and update it to reflect the changes I have made. Hopefully I can get my updates confirmed and order this board so I can start testing it.
I’ve begun re designing the controller board for Carnegie Mellon’s StuCo class Fun With Robots.
The current board, the Firefly, designed by Botrics, has some issues with it that we would like to have resolved. First off, the boards we get from Botrics are sometimes inconsistent in design within a batch. By redesigning the board, we can guarantee the boards are consistent across a whole class worth. In addition to the inconsistencies, I will be adding some new features and upgrading some components.
The big upgrade I will be doing is replacing the serial connection with a USB connection. I may also replace the motor driver and upgrade the microcontoller.
For now I’m just going to redesign the board. In the future I may try to create my own new board.
