Robot Fest 2010
Today the family and I went to Robot Fest, held at the National Electronics Museum. I had been looking forward to this for a long time, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were any number of fun displays and workshops, including in no particular order: compressed-air rocket launches, Lego robots to control and build, a vocoder […]
A nice coasterbot surprise
This morning, I got an e-mail from YouTube asking me to sign up for revenue sharing on my “popular video” of coasterbot folding. I didn’t think too much about this, because that was a 10 second video I shot one-handed. I hadn’t even bothered adding an audio track, or a link back here. The only […]
Finishing up the coasterbot electronics (mostly)
After building the Ardweeny, and modifying the servo motors, there was only one major bit of soldering left: the breadboard voltage regulator. The Ardweeny requires an input voltage of exactly 5V, a common requirement for many chips. This is solved by using a voltage regulator. This is available as a simple component ($1.59 from RadioShack) […]
Spinning our wheels
We need a way to make the coasterbot move, and without getting too exotic, this means adding some wheels. And some motors to make them turn. The Jameco bundle includes two Hitech HS-322HD servo motors. Once again, this was all new to me, so I did some reading. Servo motors are used to precisely position […]
Ardweeny adventures, part two
I have a working Ardweeny! The Solarbotics replacement kit arrived this afternoon. I assembled it as before, with a few differences. The male programming headers were put in with the proper orientation. And I decided to test the Ardweeny without soldering the chip in at first — the pressure of the outer pins holds it […]
Ardweeny adventures, part one
The parts bundle for the coasterbot includes a microcontroller to act as the brain of the robot. It is an Ardweeny, made by Solarbotics. Billed as the “smallest, handiest, bread-board friendly Arduino-compatible”, it literally fits on the back of the ATMega328 chip. It’s a pretty cool design, and incredibly small, as you can see in the […]
Constructing the DVD chassis
I was pleasantly surprised to find that my blog of the coasterbot build has been featured in MAKE: Robot Build Dispatch #5. Fortunately I have been working on the bot, so I can add some new material. For this installment I’ll continue discussing the chassis design. As described in an earlier post, I want to […]
Testing coasterbot construction ideas
The definining feature of a coasterbot is that its chassis relies on CDs or DVDs. Most of the ideas uploaded to the MAKE flickr coasterbot pool have a robot with one CD, or two of them stacked vertically. There is a good reason for this. A small footprint allows for a more agile robot, and […]
Entering the MAKE coasterbot contest
MAKE Magazine has created a contest to make a coaster bot. The basic rules are pretty simple: Contestants will build “CoasterBots,” mini robot development platforms, made using CD/DVD media as the main body components (“coaster” being slang for a dead/damaged CD/DVD). Your goal is to create a CoasterBot that can navigate a space on its […]