Finally doing some bot building

Yay, I finally am getting to work on my XMOS project. I've had a three foot stick of 1/2" x 3/4" aluminum angle stock for weeks now. Today I lopped two six inch lengths off, nibbled out some pockets for the servo housings, and drilled em. Reall impressive, eh? ;) At least it's moving along again.

Top left, clockwise: 4xAA battery holder, Lego wheel with servo horn screwed on, XMOS XK-1 with XTAG programmer, left frame rail, modified servo, right frame rail + drive assembly. Please forgive the crappy photo, it's just from the phone. I'll get more better picslater on.

Now I need to hack the servo-ness completely out of the servo casings and add an optical encoder so I can get reasonable distance measurements. The motors will likely end up being run via an SN754410 H-Bridge I think.

Update:
Still haven't opened the servos to de-servo-mo-tize them. Instead I cut up a dollar-store clipboard and made the chassis/body/thingie instead. The clipboard is 0.125" fiber/paper board stuff. With the aluminum frame rails it should be plenty sturdy, especially since the whole thing is only six inches square anyway.

Front 3/4-ish view, right side up

Upside down

The original idea was to put the battery box on the bottom, in between the frame rails. Naturally I didn't think hard enough when drilling the mounting holes, those rear bolts are smack in the middle of the batt box. I'll re-drill them a bit further back tomorrow. And the front bolts are in the way of putting a nut on the servos' front mounting bolts. Those thread into the aluminum okay, but not enough to trust permanently. Since there isn't enough room to re-drill the front ones I'll just put a goober of loc-tite on those at final assembly.

So, there's the first step of 812-R5. Hopefully it won't take me quite so long to get around to working on this one some more. I'll make a proper robot project page after it actually does something.

Note: more/all photos available under the XMOS tag on my Flickr page

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