Robot Hack continued

Real Robots Hack

Have this unfinished robot from around 10 years ago or more ..... parts came with a magazine every two weeks and I was doing it until it stopped being sold in shops where I lived and I never got to finish it.  So im going to see can I use it as a base for a robot and use parts of it and remove other parts.  Going to remove all the electronic boards ..... keep the light sensor and line follower. The 9v battery connector should be able to rig up and connect to my Arduino board and put my board in instead of the old electronics .... the 6v connector will power the motors on the robot which ill be keeping might have to run a cable to the Arduino board.  So with a bit of help form the Lets Make Robots site should hopefully get this up and running as a training bot for me to mess around with and learn with.

Ok have started ..... removed old electronics and just checking out first of the connections.  Have connected up the 6v battery to the motor controller and have run a test on two other motors to see if the connection is ok. Works fine ... when running if i turn off switch on robot ... motors go off and when i turn switch back on motors resume. next step will be to connect robot motors to motor board ..... simple enough to do ... but will be messy as i wont have proper connectors.

Well have a problem ..... runs fine with two test motors ... but when i connect up to robot motors things dont go as well .... it runs one motor for one direction and then stops when code tells it too but for reverse it changes motors and runs that one in reverse.
so have a bit of figuring out to do.

Parts arrive from YourDino

Finally i have some stuff to work with .... Yes the parts I ordered from YourDino have arrived. Main parts are a arduino mega 1280 board ... motor controller board ... servo ... stepper motor and stepper motor board ... plus i got a electrical kit with various componments including a small breadboard.

So i can start learning a bit about micro controllers and programming ...  have connected and tried out the servo  the stepper-motor and board and the motor board with motors connected. All went well without too much trouble. Did require help figuring out how to wire up the motor board to the arduino board .... thankfully being a part of the Lets Make Robots site meant i got help quickly and got sorted. 

Will probably do a write up on connecting the motor board to the arduino board as a reference for others who might have problems doing this.
Also managed to figure out out too write the code to control the motors ... so was very happy with this as im new to writing code too .....

Joule Thief

Joule Thief circuit ..... it works ..... Nice one.
Will come back to this as i have received my first order of parts from yourdino and im trying them out.

My miller engine ... works  ....
Ok so its not pretty ... but i have very little to work with at the moment. But the important thing is it works.  I have tried this before using a slightly different layout which included another transistor and it didnt work and when i saw this layout i tried it .. not expecting it to work either .... but i was very happy when it did.




Its a extremely simple circuit to make and it can be adjusted to make it run different.  You can change the value of the capacitors and it will change the timing and strength of the engine ... eg the capacitor between the legs of the voltage regulator regulates how long the main capacitors charge for before they trip and discharge ... a low value and the circuit can discharge and recharge quickly ... but less power gets built up. I found that i had to put a bigger cap here as my motor wouldnt run with a low cap where as my led worked fine. I have a 1000uf there now and it gives the motor a good few turns per burst where as with a 220 uf you might only get part to one turn on a discharge. Hopefully next week ill be ordering parts and i will spend a bit of time trying out different size caps to see what results i prefer.

Another part you can change is the diode .. eg add another diode in series with the one in the circuit and you raise the voltage that the regulator trips at. I havent got to try this yet but im sure i will in time.