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.
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.
Here is a view of the board:
Pretty isn’t 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.