Electric Long-board

When this year’s lock-down started a few months ago, I finally bought myself a long-board so that I could keep up with the kids on their bikes or scooters when exercising.
It didn’t take long before I remembered that I always wanted to build an electric "toy" that could carry myself.
I contemplated a bike, a Go Kart and others, but it’s always been pretty obvious that the easiest to attempt would be a skateboard…

Self Balancing Robot – V4

It’s been almost 4 years since I started playing with self balancing robots posting about the very first version, then the 2nd really unsuccessful one and finally a really jittery / impossible to control 3rd version…

Now it’s finally time to show you something that actually works !

Electronic Art

 

I had been wanting to do this for such a long time…

Self Balancing Robot – V3

Same as the previous post, this is an old project that still doesn’t work properly, but will probably never have the time to fix, so I’ve decided to post the details here, in case I need to refer to them later.

Self Balancing Robot – V2

This is a quick post to dump some pictures and lessons learneth the hard way, when I tried to build a nicer / better self balancing robot.

All this dates back from October 2014, so more than 1 year ago, but I finally gave up on trying to make this work and wanted to keep all this info/details for my own reference.

Arduino, when the Servo library is not good enough…

 

I went back to try and finish this ball balancing project, but after some improvements I started to get frustrated by the fact that the servos kept being “jittery”.

Time for my new and shiny servo tester I thought… ! It turned out I was seeing the same problem.

Optical Wheel Encoder from Infrared Printer Sensor

Quick post about some intermediary work I had to do while working on my new Self Balancing robot.

Once the basics were done and the robot was balancing, I realised that it seemed unstable as it wasn’t staying in place…

The easiest way to deal with this would be an optical encoder for the wheels, that would tell me how much each moves.

Optical sensor mounted

Self balancing robot

It’s really been a very long time since I added this on my todo list, and in the past couple of week-ends I finally found the time to do it.

Stepper motor bluetooth serial driver

First Test using an Arduino (clone) board

Above is the image of my very first attempt of driving this nice little bi-polar stepper motor (M35SP-11HPK) that I had salvaged from a broken Canon printer a while ago.

I have quickly put together a L293D H-bridge with an Arduino board and using the Stepper library was quite straight forward

For the impatient you can see a (probably boring) video right after the break…

SRF05 Ultra-Sonic Ranger

I’ve just spend a couple of hours preparing this ultra-sonic ranger and the necessary code to integrate it into my autonomous tank project.

Here’s a quick post briefly explaining the theory and providing some Arduino code for it.

SRF05 in all its glory