Friday 24 May 2013

Pictures :)

A few posts ago I mentioned I got some new stuff, and promised pictures, well, here they are:

My snomobiles:
 

The pictures are kind of deceiving, the track looks pretty small, but it is actually 8ish inches long
 
And here are a cupple pics of the new A2 (they are pretty bad, the lighting was not great, and they were taken on an iPod)
I also have some videos, but they need to be uploaded to youtube, and some better pics taken by the camera mounted on the bot, but those are still on a memory card. Time kinda gets away from you sometimes.

Mis(guided)sile first peek

Here are a cupple pics of the very first little bit of progress on my missile project:

The missile as it sits right now:
 How I hope the control fins will work, two linked together in the nose cone with a servo powering them, and two in the body, each with their own servos, to control roll and yaw, with microcontroler board shown.
All of the componts I have now sitting together.
I have not really gotten further than that, I picked up some stepper motors and an old scanner over theweekend, and my next project will probably be a plotter built out of those. Either that, or that oragami ball rc thingamajig I mentioned last post. Project officially added to my pile/list of half baked and half finished projects laying about my room :)

Thursday 16 May 2013

Rambling #5 (thoughts on bots)

I was browsing Hackaday a little while ago, and I came across This homebrew guided rocket and it looked pretty cool. I have a few model rockets and appropriate engines for them, some micro servos, a micro magician microcontroler and a few one cell lipo batterys from some cheap RC helis. 9 and 10 DOF IMUs are cheap and so are single and 3 axis gyros on ebay, and after seing the results of their rocket, I think a gyro or 3 is deffinately necessary instead of an accelerometer, altho I might make use of one of those too (the micro magician has one on board) So I have, or can soon have all the parts necessary to try my hand at building one of those. My father has been encouraging me to try building things other than various takes on obsitical avoidance, and I think this could be cool. My rocket body is a bit smaller than the one they used, so I am contemplating straping on another two rocket engines to the base of my Mis(Guided)Sile to give me a bit more thrust, and either using rear-ejection parachutes, much like this:
or none at all, after all, this IS missile, and after having a look at their rocket after it's flight, I dont know how well it would survive even with a parachute...

I have also been thinking about building a propeller powered missile/airplane hybrid using a rear mounted brushless motor like This one swinging a large prop to give me huge amount of thrust, 4 oversized rear fins, sorta acting like really small wings, and probably four fins at the front for pich/yaw, much like the sidewinder
The difference with mine, is I will have 2 fins in the middle, linked together to give me roll control, thus enabling me to have only 3 servos on board (each controling two fins for each degree of freedom, simplifying control, and saving on weight) I think if I do some looking around I should be able to get a motor/esc/prop/battery combo that will give me better than 1.5 to 1 thrust to weight ratio for the whole thing, enabling me to have it take off vertically and fly for a bit longer than the estes rocket motors.

Also possibly coming down the pipe, project wise are:
1. fabbing up a better mounting bracket for Going Whole HOG, letting me take it to some higher speeds without worrying about it coming apart, and possibly automating the thing, which would make it my fastest obstical avoider to date (Lets see if those picaxes REALLY do run at 64Mhz...)

2. As my last post said, I got a new chassis for AutoSquared, so when I get some time, I will get it posted on LMR, right now all it does is avoid stuff, but with my compass and GPS in hand I hope to change that soon...

3. One of these:
Except in a blue PAPER! Origami shell. Not really sure if it will work, but it will be interesting weather it works or not. probably going to be just RC not a robot (someone find me a sensor capible of seeing thru blue paper, and I will make it autonomus....

4. The missiles I mentioned in this post hopefully....

5. Possibly that electric bike hub motor powered big outdoor robot (if that thing ever makes it into the real world I am totally mounting a laser sighted paintball gun or potato cannon on it. :)

6. A 2 DOF hexapod ( I have all the servos I need, and I do already have 2 and 4 legged bots under my belt, and now I need more legs.)

7. giving my quadcopter a new body, and a pan/tilt camera with live feed down to the ground. I will have a seperate tx/rx controling the pan/tilt so I can focus on flying and someone else can get some footage.

8. at some point I might finish up GPS (my other outdoor bot)


One last thing before I sign off, If you are an FBI agent or anything, and are adding me to your watch list because I mentioned making small missiles, do not worry about it, if they ever get made, I am not going to be doing anything devious with them, all they will ever amount to is a slightly stabilized/ angle holding projectiles, or funny looking RC airplanes. But feel free to keep dropping by, I appreciate the page views :)

A Quick Update

It feels like it has been a while since I posted anything, I have been doing a lot of school; according to the native beings that inhabit this planet, apparently school is more important than building robots and posting stuff about them, or something like that. Anyway, while I was away I got some cool stuff, another chassis for autosquared, with some really big wheels, two remote controled snowmobiles to take the treads from and a new (to me) computer, two serial ports, 3 parallel, two screens, lots of usb, a few firewire, and five disc drives to round things out. I am most excited about the two serial ports, cause now I can program multipule picaxes without having to swich cables, and the two screens (arranged vertically instead of the usuall side by side, because I use the comp mostly for programing, and programs tend to be MUCH longer than they are wide) for now I can have a lot more of my code visible, and/or code and have a refrence PDF open at the same time. Soon I will have some pictures up of all my aquisitions, and hopefully a panorama of my lair, uh, room.