Mirobot

16 Dec 2013

Chassis Evolution

The chassis for Mirobot has changed quite a bit since I first started designing it. It's now at a point where it actually works and I feel a lot more confident about using it with people other than myself. I've got two sets of the new one ready to be boxed up for Christmas for my kids now which was my driver for building it in the first place. We'll have some fun soldering over Christmas. I was looking through the old chassis designs and thought it would be interesting to trace the design evolution from the first stages, where it just didn't work, to now where it does. The changes are relativel ...

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11 Dec 2013

Webscale

I spent some time today putting together a simple web page that would allow me to send commands to Mirobot from a web page. I used Blockly to make a Scratch-like gui for composing your commands, then made a quick and dirty WebSocket <-> TCP proxy using Node.js so I could send them direct from the browser. I'm going to put the WebSocket handling into the Arduino eventually, so this is just a quick fix for now. One of the nice things about the WiFi module I'm using is that it has space onboard to embed some web pages, so I'll be able to make a nice GUI that's served from the robot itself.

I like the ...

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09 Dec 2013

Mirobot is alive!

After working on a lot of the component parts of Mirobot in isolation, I decided it was about time to actually make it do what it has been designed to do; draw!

I ran this simple program on it:

REPEAT 5 [
  FORWARD 120
  RIGHT 144
]
Which makes it go forward 120mm and then turn 144 degrees to the right (5 times). That's the beauty of a simple language like LOGO when it comes to these first steps of learning how to program - it's very easy to understand what it's meant to do. This (if you haven't already run it through in your head) makes it draw a five pointed star. Here's the proof:

One of the iss ...

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28 Nov 2013

New PCBs

These little beauties arrived in my mail the other day. They're from Ragworm and I have to say I've been pretty impressed with both the service and the nice little goodies you get with the order.

PCBs

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