Some progress
It took quite a while for the kit I ordered from Adafruit to arrive - and of course when it did it sat in the post office for a while waiting for me to find the time to go and pay the £15 customs charge (of which £8 was paid for the privilege of the Royal Mail handling it at all). Anyway, I spent some time at the weekend with my 4 year old son, Euan, soldering the stepper driver board together (he mainly enjoyed snipping the solder) so I'm now at the point of trying to get the motors going.
I'm also planning on joining the London Hackspace so that I can make use of their nice new (ish) laser cutt ...
Read moreDecisions Decisions
I've been doing some research into the various components that will be used to make the robot. At a high level I'm going to need:
- A controller
- A motor driver
- 2 motors
- 2 wheels
- A chassis
- A pen control mechanism ~
So far I've been thinking that I'll laser-cut a chassis design from some ply which should assemble quite well and be sturdy enough. Plus, in the spirit of open hardware, it is an easily reproducable design that others can build - I'm also hoping to laser-cut the wheels in the same process. I'm going with the Arduino for the controller because it's an excellent open hardware platform to use wit ...
Read moreBuilding an ArduinoBot
After a fantastic visit to the London Science Museum, and seeing the original Turtle robot, I was filled with nostalgia for little robots that can draw. As the son of a teacher I was fortunate because during the school holidays lots of technology got brought home to play with. One of my favourite things was the BBC Turtle robot. ~
Image copyright paulsilver @ flickr
Now that I've got children of my own I thought it would be good to let them play with these kind of robots as well so decided to set about making one that others can build too. I'm particularly keen to create something that a teacher ...
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