We built three robots for the upcoming Sumo Bot contest. Two were the Pololu Zumo kit and one from Parallax. Other than wheels and a paint job there haven’t been many mods that have stuck. We experimented using an Intel Edison board to control the Pololu Zumo but library compatibility problems with the sensors had…read more
I tweaked the way the Wii nunchuck controls the Poppy Jr. The motion is now smoother. The motor selection now includes changing the right-left control between the bottom motor and the elbow motor. The trick was rather than mapping the position of the Wii joystick to a position of the servo, the servo was moved…read more
Poppy Ergo Sr got cleaned up a bit. It’ all red now and the wiring is more compact. The display shows the status of the Wii nunchuck, the servo selected and the calculated coordinates. The movements are smoother although it doesn’t have all the improvements we are making on it’s little sibling.
We’ve been playing with some small OLED displays from the folks at Adafruit. The color screen has a built-in microSD card for reading bitmaps. The 128×32 monochrome screen uses the SSD1306 which has a great clear screen function allowing simple animations, like flying toasters. It probably looks better on the 128×64 version but it seems…read more
The AX-12A robot arm just wasn’t going as well as desired, so I decided to start over. Using the servos and frames designs from Robotis’ Bioloid we assembled an arm configured similar to the Poppy Ergo Jr project. The controller is a OpenCM9.04C, with a 16×2 character LCD for data output and a Wii nunchuck…read more
Finally put together Lynxmotion’s Viper kit. The chassis and wheel provide a nice starting point. For our outfit used Adafruit motor shield on a Arduino Uno. We originally started with a Arduino 101 but ran into some library incompatibilities and switched to Uno. Lynxmotion has some line detectors that fit nice in the chassis and…read more
Made some tweaks to the AX-12A robot arm. First, was swapping out the CM-700 for a OpenCM9.04c controller board. This allow programming through the Arduino IDE. Next a 16×2 LCD display was added to provide some information of the arm in operation. Finally a Wii nunchuck as add to control the arm. With the Arduino IDE…read more
Refreshed from the previous post about the STEM expo project. It took them a better part of the afternoon to get the robot assembled. The following weekend they programmed up a series of poses. It was great to watch their reaction when their creation first moved. The code was simplified further so it was really…read more
Created a simplified version of the OpenCM program to run a Poppy Ergo Jr -based robotic arm. This is being used by our 1st grade daughter and friend at the school STEM expo. There is just three lines of code they need to change to create new robotics poses. It’s a great educational tool to…read more
Robot Sumo Contest and Demonstration April 24, 1-3pm Los Altos Library community room Address: 13 S San Antonio Rd, Los Altos, CA 94022 Phone:(650) 948-7683 More details will be posted on the Contest webpage: https://primorobots.com/robot-sumo-contest/ Examples of kits available https://www.pololu.com/product/2510: $99 assembled / ~$80 for kit https://www.parallax.com/product/27400: $129 assembled required / $229 full kit…read more