Content in “cheap”

Easy Freebie LEDs

psy — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:55:13 +0200

A quick tip for all you cheap skates out there. I've always had it in my head that I would like my robot to have no permanent connections, to allow me to experiment and reconfigure. This also has the nice side effect of less soldering for me to mess up. I actually have a cunning plan to pay my flatmate in jelly beans to do the tough bits for me; he's an electrical engineer (rock!).

Little 8R

fritsl — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:40:04 +0100

Primary image

What does it do?

Shows how far you can get with very few and cheap materials

Ok, I can now proudly present part II of the "Little 8"-project!

All I did was actually to cut the bumper's wire, place a ER900RS-02 instead of it (tried to have both, but nogo), fire up my old joystick Black Box.. and camera.. and go :D (20 minutes max)

The code in it:

'What is recieved for any 9 possible positions of jopystick + 2 buttons:
'ABC
'DSF
'GHI
'X Y
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
'high 0,1,2,4' set all pins conected to motor as output pins
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
high 0,1,2,4
main:
serin 3, T2400, b0
select case b0
'case "X" - not used to save memory in Picaxe 08, tricks are performed with trick-data send from outside
'case "Y" - not used to save memory in Picaxe 08, tricks are performed with trick-data send from outside
case "B"
let pins = %00010010
case "C"
let pins = %00010000
case "A"
let pins = %00000010
case "F"
let pins = %00010001
case "D"
let pins = %00000110
case "H"
let pins = %00000101
case "G"
let pins = %00000100
case "I"
let pins = %00000001
else 'Case "S" for "Stop"
let pins = %00000000
endselect
goto main
' There you go - total drive-control in every way from serial input..in 104 bytes out of 128 possible with Picaxe8.. 24 bytes left ;)

- So all tricks and everything is actually made in my magic black box, which is esentially an old joystick with an Easy Radio, Picaxe28, LCD, some nots etc.. From that I send all the commands, and so i just press "Fire" on the joystick to make it spin 360, the other button to do another trick, turn a not and make ajustements etc :)

So.. Now little 8 can be controlled by a picaxe28 with an EA on it. Well.. Now another robot is going to be just that, and so another robot will control Little 8 :) .. I think ;)

Cost to build

$50,00

Embedded video

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Finished project

Complete

Number

Time to build

5 hours

Type

wheels

URL to more information

Weight

75 grams

Little 8

fritsl — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 16:06:59 +0100

Primary image

What does it do?

Very cheap but fun little beginners robot. It think' it has a brains within a Picaxe 8

From building big, nasty, with large shovel, 2 cores, multiple sensors, soundsystem etc, I got tired of that.. and decided to see what fun I could have with a little Picaxe 8 on a board ($16, total prize for robot is about $40).

Version II of this fella here: http://letsmakerobots.com/node/101

I have since recieved some interest in how to build this extremely easy and cheap robot, and so I hereby transform this post to a small and simple tutorial:

Shopping list:

Can be bought from Picaxe: