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…

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