Ignore At Your Shin’s Peril
Regular readers know that I occasionally assume the role of ‘ole Dad Roby and hand down what I believe to be hard-won wisdom. When you’re testing out your wheelchair robot — especially in the early phases before you know it like the … Continued
Sabertooth Tricks
Last time we spoke at length about the Sabertooth controller and mentioned it’s ability to record flight data. Here is a sample recording from a run of a big rover (specifically, the big robot pictured above): It turns out this data is … Continued
Sabertooth Standing Tall
Welcome back fellow, future, and potential robotocists! In our last post we played with a little fire while programming the M60. While taking the photo above I became curious what was beneath the heat-sink for the M60, so here we … Continued
Fried Driver
Let’s start this off with some outtakes from playing chicken with Rover 2: Now some of you guys are thinking that’s irresponsible. Agreed. But hey, ever thought you may get to be 90 years old and wish you’d been … Continued
Rover 2 is Born
Today we introduce Rover 2! Rover 2 is one small step for our project, one giant leap in terms of utility. This robot frame is made to carry people, and in the USA, that’s often an ambitious proposition. Enough talk, … Continued
Overvoltage
Rover 1 has been a fun project, but Rover 1 is too small for our ambitions. It’s time to start working with a wheelchair-based robot platform. However, before we make the move, let’s make one last modification to Rover 1. … Continued
Rover 1 Arduino RC Code
In our last post we spent a good bit of time speculating why folks are often afflicted with Codeaphobia. At the end of the post we gave a super-small Arduino program that makes the Arduino’s LED blink. Today, I’m going … Continued
Don’t Fear the Code Reaper
As promised in the last post, today we are going to have The Talk about programming. So grab a log and put in on the fire, come on over here little whipper-snapper and listen close as ‘ole dad Roby tells … Continued
Rover 1 is Born
In the last post, we decided to take a small detour away from immediately building big rovers. So today let’s tackle this exercise of creating a small-scale RC-controlled rover as an introduction for future efforts. Since we’re going to be … Continued
Whoa There Horsey!
Welcome back my friends! Immediately after hitting publish on the last post, I knew that we had to point the true beginner roboticist to a wonderful tool for starting out in robotics. I highly recommend you consider purchasing a skid-steer … Continued