mintvelt's blog

This part of my mini R2D2 project. i'll post all the updates on the main body in this blog page.

This is the first bit of frame with some extra bits. Those pieces are for two doors: one large one that covers allmost the whole back and a small one in the front.

This page is part of my mini r2d2 project and this is where I keep track of my progress on it's Legs.

I only just got started on them and allready I realise there will be lots and lots of sanding to be done. The legs are very thick so I need to glue several pieces together.

This is part of my mini-R2D2 project. I intend to keep blog pages for the different parts of the building process. 

The dome is made out of a clear plastic sphere. I found 2 globes 16cm in diameter and 2 smaller ones 4cm across.

First step. Dremel off the bit that is sticking out and sand the whole thing. 

After lots of thinking about what my next robot should look like, I couldn't resist the temptation of trying to improve Edward. I never really made a good program for him and everybody who sees him ask me to switch him on and let him run around. When they do, i shrug and tell them "the batteries are dead" or "I'm still working on the programming".

This is the second board I received from sparkfun / batchPCB. The other one, a motor driver, is tested and done.

After a few weeks of waiting, my PCBs have arrived. I just soldered the components on the first one and it works like a charm. I had to drill out the holes for the resistors a bit and then solder the resistors on both sides of the board to get a good connection, but hey: this was also my first shot at having a PCB made and it works. Next time I'll be more careful checking out the dimensions in diptrace.

I got some questions from Adobi123 on the design of the board I built for Edward. I dont have any schematics cause it was done on the fly by laying the components on the board and trying out which locations would fit best. Anyway; I made a description of the components I used and I'll link some of them to relevant pages with documentation.

This will eventually become a robot project, but because my progress is so very slow, I decided to post the bits and pieces I have as a blog. That way you guys can start commenting and I get to show my pretty pictures.

The bot I'm working on will combine some of the things I allready posted as walkthroughs. Mainly it will feature the mintvelt object tracker and inter-picaxe serial communication.

I was looking for a way to have a robots head follow something or someone around. I've seen some robots that have a servo with an IR-sensor on top that finds either the left or the right edge of anything you put in front of it. I toyed around with that, but I got frustrated with a few things.

If you follow the left edge of an object, the robot allways seem to look slightly left past the object instead of in the middle. Also:When the edge is detected, the servo goes from left to right and back between detecting the object and looking past it.