Autonomous Army Truck – 1. Mechanics

This is the 6 wheels drive toy army truck that I bought several years ago (for fairly cheap) for one of my kids.

When reading the specs (6wd, 3 differentials, independent suspensions on each wheel, etc. … ) it sounded too good to be true for the price… and indeed, I remember being disappointed when I received it : the rubber of the wheels kept coming off, the battery was really bad, but most importantly both the steering and the main motor were simply on/off not *proportional* !

At the same time, I was impressed by the modularity of the design, how everything was screwed rather then glued in place and how easy everything was to take apart, ready to be modified / upgraded…

And I *knew* I could do better… sooo much better !

Here’s what it can do *now*, after the 2 main mechanical upgrades:

Ball Balancing – V2

Same story here as with the last couple of posts: these are some rather old attempts at improving a previous project, without much success, even after a considerable amount of effort… Hence the decision to still create a post as a future 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.

Ball Balancing

 

I know it’s been a while since my last post, but 2 kids and a new job take their toll 🙂

Most importantly, for this past few months, I’ve been thinking of a way to say “thank you” to my former colleagues that somehow managed to offer me the absolute best leaving present: a Meccano kit and a prepaid Maplin card (this is the equivalent of the now defunct Radioshack, for my U.S. readers) !

Ex fellow markiteers, this post is for you, thank you for your present and more importantly thank you for having been such nice colleagues for almost 9 years !

In love with Espruino…

I know, it has an awful name… still, after I discovered it a few days ago through their new kickstarter campaign I decided to give it a try. And I’m happy I did so, as it’s really an awesome product !

FPGA : RC Servo and Stepper motor control in Verilog

It’s been a while since my last post … 8 months more exactly, which is probably one of the biggest gap in recent years… Having 2 kids is taking its toll on my hobby ! 🙂

A couple of months ago I did a tricky soldering job for a friend, to fix the wire / jack of his hi-fi ear phones, and I almost made a post about it… and then I realised, “hold on, is this how lame I have become, blogging about something as trivial as tricky tiny wire soldering ?”.

So here is something slightly more interesting, that I managed to work on this past week-end: my first foray into FPGAs !