Building robots is expensive. Motors $20, controller $20, motor driver $20, sensors $10, battery $10. Just the basic components and you’re already up to $80. The costs add up fast and it’s hard to pour a lot of money into building a lot of robots. That’s one reason why it’s great to have a resource like the Robotics Club. If I wanted, I could walk in and build a complete robot with parts that are already there. All I would have to invest is time, no money (well, a $25 membership fee, but that’s beside point).
Because building robots is expensive, for now I’m going to be focusing on projects that don’t require funding or that I have funding for already. I’m going to focus on Mobot (which I have almost all of the parts for), Micro-Colony (which I’m getting funded through the Build18 project), StairBot (a robotics club project I’m the head of, I’ll keep updated on its status as I work on it), and some other projects that I have in mind.
Unfortunately, I’m pushing Desk Rover to the side for the time being. Mainly because my robot fund is a little short of the price tag of desk rover, and I have plenty of other robots to work on in the meantime. I will build the first stage (chassis, sensors, motors, etc. no LCD or wireless) once I have enough money.
I will continue to work on the FWR3 Jasper. Most of the work in it is design work as of now, and that doesn’t cost anything but time (which, I now have a lot of as I’m on break).
Today I found out that CMU’s RoboClub’s Colony robots have encoders which could be used for the Jasper platform. The colony robots use the same motors and wheels that Jasper will use. The encoders are magnetic (not optical). This will save me a lot of development.
I still need to do a lot of development with the board. But, the robotics club might have PCB fab supplies which would speed things up greatly. I need to talk to some club members to see what we have.
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.