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 !

RC Car Electronics

This, to some extent, is a continuation of this post, where I replaced the motors and some gears to fix one of my son’s RC cars.

I remove the electronics and replace them completely, including the remote for which I now use a freshly made wireless Wii Nunchuck.

The results are far from impressive in terms of manoeuvrability, but it was really fun to build and I think the handling can still be improved by tweaking the mix between the 2 joystick axes.

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.

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.

Tiger 1 BB airsoft RC Tank – V2

It’s all about the same project as here, BUT with a different technology: instead of using the FEZ Domino (.NET micro framework based) board, I’ll be using the Lego NXT controller and an Arduino board for low level interaction with the electronics.

NXT + Arduino internals

My first H-bridge

While working on my latest autonomous tank project, something very annoying happened: I needed to control 2 motors for the turret and the firing of the gun, BUT out of the 3 completely different motor controllers that I had laying around (a L293D based one, a pololu serial controller and a micro RC ESC) NONE was working… !!!

This was so frustrating, that it forced me to want to build my very first H-Bridge from scratch. This is something I had always avoided, thinking that “I had better things to do”, ie spend time on higher level stuff …

I started with this schema, taken from the Internet and slightly modified (it initially used 2.2KOhms resistors, but on all the other sites people were using 1K, as a better compromise):

TIP120 base H-Bridge motor controller

Tiger 1 BB airsoft RC Tank

CONTINUED HERE…

Together with a work colleague we have set ourselves a challenge: buy 2 1/16th RC tanks capable of firing BB pellets and transform them such that we can have an AUTONOMOUS BATTLE !

Unboxing

Lego NXT – Arduino Truck

New & improved NXT truck and LeJOS running brick !

The beast after the lifting...