Arduinobot is now Mirobot
The project is still very much alive. After a hiatus of almost two years it's great to be posting something here again.
The first news is that I've changed the name of the project. Arduinobot was a bad name because it piggy-backed on the Arduino brand (which is a bad thing to do) so I've renamed it to Mirobot. There are a few things behind the name but essentially it came from thinking about what an artistic drawing robot might be called. It's named after Joan Miró, the 20th Century Spanish artist.
Since I left Xively I've been dedicating several days a week to completing the first version of Miro ...
Read moreOpenSCAD
It's been a pretty busy Christmas period having moved house (again) but I've been making some more progress on the chassis. One of the things that has been bugging me with my current system based on Illustrator is that it is so difficult to make small changes (e.g. the material thickness) because you have to manually go and tweak all of the dimensions of all of the slots and holes to compensate. So on my normal rounds of exploring makers on the web I came across this smart bottle carrier which mentioned that it was built in OpenSCAD which allows you to make parametric changes to the design to adju ...
Read morePen arm working
Here's a quick demo of the pen arm in action:
I'm pretty happy with how it's working. Now I just need to get the drive train working. I think a few things are conspiring against it at the moment:
- Underpowered steppers - I'm intentionally using smaller steppers to keep the cost down, but powering these from 5V USB means they haven't got much power. I'm going to use a 12V battery pack to get a bit more out of them.
- Drag from the USB cable - the only USB cable I have is pretty stiff so puts quite a lot of drag on the bot. I've got a bluetooth module I'm going to use which, in combination with the bat ...
Chassis v2
I got the second version of the chassis back from skpang yesterday and managed to quickly assemble it late last night to see how it is looking. Here's a photo of it next to the v1 chassis: 
It's virtually the same design but has a few refinements. This time you can see the "mudguards" which aren't really mudguards but more like plates that hold the outer end of the axle in place. They seem to work quite well as the wheels are much less wobbly than on the v1 chassis. You can also see the drive wheel that fits on the gear of the stepper motor. Although this is looser than expected it gets held in pla ...
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