Mr. Tidy

hi thanks for your reply, It took a couple of weeks to be notified and in the interim I got the encoders working.

When you mentioned that the wheel encoders were press fitted to the shafts, I checked the arm and gripper sprockets and they too are just press fitted. The whole setup is just held captive by rubber friction fit washer thingys! A little manipulation with some long nose pliers and the sprockets can be extracted with little effort and no frame disassembly. a bit of modding with some sandpaper and a file and the encoder surfaces are now closer and work fine.

As much as it is disappointing to have to do this to get a new product to function correctly, it was no where as hard as I had imagined it would be, I would recommend this fix to anyone else having difficulty with the encoders.

IF YOU WANT THIS ROBOT:

I have mixed feelings about this product, despite all the problems I have had, I still think its possibly a great introductory robot platform and has great potential for additional functionality and comes at a very reasonable price. I purchased it along with an Arduino inventors set from sparkfun. And as my first foray into electronics and microprocessors I was confident being Arduino and having arduino type support I would just have to watch the forums and learn..........Unfortunately the jump from basic intro Arduino stuff to Mr Tidy s level is quite a big one....and the documentation via forums is non existent (try google Mr Tidy and pickup some tips). Without noob level guidance and active forums on the subject with beginners sharing their solutions its almost impossible to pick it up as you go.

A little more quality control and some more step by step documentation and this robot could be the benchmark in affordable introductory robotics. There is not a comparable (at this price) product on the market, but this is also the least well documented arduino project I have found. Beyond the original posts where Mr Tidy was created there is almost no follow up, no mods, no one else seems to have bought one!

If you have not played with arduino or similar , and are not prepared for a challenge, do not buy this bot! That being said If you do have some arduino experience and can overcome the encoder and other quality issues then this has a lot of functionality for less bucks than anything else I could find.

Anyways thats my tupence worth on the subject, if I figure out how to do some more stuff that might assist others, I will try and post here in LMR.

on a slightly different note;

The speed of the robot seems to be set a little high for my environment. I live in a mobile home and with not much available, I intend to try amending the program to see if i can slow him down a bit, any pointers on how best to achieve this would be appreciated.

lastly, thank you for including the IR control sketch, to be honest I cant really figure out exactly what I have to do to implement the  IR control.

If im guessing correctly, I require an old IR remote, which I map the output of using one of the sketches and the receiver on the robot and display the output to a serial monitor. Then..........I start getting a little lost!..........I think I record this output to somewhere?........then include this value somewhere in one of the other sketches which one and how I have no Idea.......I think I then reboot the robot into another of the sketches....and eventually the robot should be able to respond in some way to IR commands. exactly how it responds presumably requires to be programed or selected or is there some default actions........And at this point I realize how in over my head I am and how it is not your job to give me a step by step robotics course ;)

I guess if I beat my head off the Internet enough times I might eventually figure out how to do this myself!

If/when I figure it out, I will attempt to document and explain how its done and post in LMR. If anyone can help with the speed and IR implementation in the meantime they are more than welcome to beat me to it!!