Chassis v1
Despite the lack of activity on this development blog I haven't been completely idle. On the train whilst commuting to work I've been working on the chassis design. The other day I got back the first version and managed to get it mostly assembled to see what works and what doesn't. It's not looking too bad. Apart from a couple of missing holes which meant I couldn't fit the plates that hold the outer end of the wheel axle it mostly fits together OK. Of course I had to do a bit of whittling because I'd designed for 3mm MDF, but the board I used turned out to be 3.3mm (I've since bought myself a ...
Read moreStarting Construction
This is the second of two posts today about the progress I made building the first early stage prototype of the Arduinobot. My main aim with this physical prototype was to test out the drive train mechanism to see if it was going to work. I'd had an idea that by driving the edge of the wheel I'd be able to use a smaller, cheaper, lower resolution stepper motor. One of my prime aims is to make this kit as cheap as possible and this means that I can use a £4 motor instead of an £8 one - it also means that I don't have to buy the expensive mounting kits for attaching the motor shaft to the wheels ...
Read moreCommand and Control
I spent today hacking at a couple of things on the Arduinobot; a Logo based command set based on the original Turtle Logo and making a prototype chassis. This post is about the Logo command set and another will follow with what I learned from the prototype.
I found a very small example of some original BBC Turtle Logo programming here and then came across some pretty good documentation along with some interactive examples here. I also found this awesome wiki by Cynthia Solomon, one of the original developers of Logo - check out the footage of the BBC turtle in some of the Youtube clips. I'd be fasci ...
Read moreSome 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 ...
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