The experiment begins! It has been causing a lot of raised eyebrows as one delivery person after the next comes to the house and drops off tiny packages. They come from companies called The Robot Shop, Sparkfun, Adafruit, and Pololu. Actually there are a few more, but suffice to say that a lot of itty-bitty boxes have shown up with my name on them.
MyBot ...in progress
Inside them, the mystery increases. They are filled with integrated circuits, resistors, capacitors, circuit boards, LEDs, wire, and a plethora of sensors. The most recognizable component was a tracked robot base; a gray rectangle with tank style cleat tracks that drive it around. Things like battery boxes and hobby servos are recognizable as well, but still, the collection gives pause to wonder what the hell all of it is for.
It’s the beginnings of a robot. A robot that I conceived of in my own little brain; a conglomerate of ideas garnered from the web and some my own memory recesses. Upon seeing me sitting at my desk, surrounded by all descriptions of components, my wife announced that she was really good at soldering. She tells no lie. My wife spent years soldering manual install components into circuit boards in addition to shoveling boards through flow solder stations. While I get all a twitter thinking of my wife and I working together on a project, the simple truth is that I bought all this crap so I could assemble it.
MyBot during fabrication
While the microcontroller Arduino comes assembled (you can buy some that aren’t) many of the shields are kits an must be assembled before they can be used. A shield is a secondary circuit board that adds some particular utility to your project. For me, that would be sensors and motor controllers. The shields do all the hard work, leaving the Arduino safely isolated but still in control. Ergo, if an idea or the assembly goes awry, you might burn up your shield but the controller will survive to control the next shield.
My robot, which has now been named MyBot, is coming along nicely. It has twin DC motors which control the treads; they can be operated in unison, or separately which gives steering ability to the robot. If one motor turns while the other is still, the robot will pivot on the unmoving track. Of course, the motors reverse so the robot can back up.
I’m using an Adafruit mshield motor shield on an Arduino Duemilanove and use a Sharp IR sensor for object detection. It appears to work pretty well.
Here’s a YouTube video of the little guy in action. Sorry for the fuzzy image, but converting it to .wmv format took a toll on image quality.