Over the weekend (yes I am a little late, but life is busy) of the sixth and seventh, I was down in Spokane and I went to the wonderful sketchy terrible store that I love to find great deals at so much. Jeez I love that store. They actually took the piles of junk that are my favourite part out of the normal stores and moved them to one store exclusively full of total junk, and its like paradise in there. Anyway, so I bought a couple things, from least to most impressive here they are:
Two more night vision security cameras, cause I just can't get enough of those :)
No particular plans for these two little suckers, just put them in stock for next time I need a security camera. Perhaps if I ever find the need I will set them up with a computer and a video capture card and a huge hard drive for some monitoring of my place.
Two of these LED lightstrips. They are 5 meters long with 27 segments of 6 LEDs each.
They came with the little box you can see in the top right hand corner, its designed to recieve a signal from an IR remote control to control the pattern, but neither of them came with the remote. Anyway, I googled around for a while and found that I could simply control them with my arduino using Adafruit's awesome NeoPixel library.
There is my ugly hacked together setup to see if it actually worked. Which it did :) here is a video of both of them running, the one in the spool is the stock demo mode that it defualts to when its on, and the unrolled one is the one being run by the arduino.
The only thing to note is that on the spooled one, there appears to be a connection break about half way thru, but if you flex it a certain way, it still works as is evident in the video. Because of the way you can chain these things its no big deal, Ill just cut that one segment out and resolder them back together, or use them as smaller strips. I plan on adding these to The Window for a nice light show as well as orientation, as suggested by Duane Degn on The Window's Letsmakerobots page.
And lastly I picked myself up a Chevy Camaro...
Ok not really:
A couple of posts back I mentioned I have trouble sticking with one project, and its true. I really do. Anyway, I picked this bad boy up to help totally revamp Project Killzone. Pretty much ever since I picked up the two motors that are in PK now I have wished to have two more so that I could make a nice sturdy 4 wheel drive chassis instead of the 2 wheel drive one I have now. Anyway, the oppertuinity came along finally to get two more at a resonable price and also, I think (think, have not tested this yet) I can use all four wheels that came with the car, cause they don't appear to need the adapter couplings that the other wheels needed.
As you can see, it uses identical wheels on the front and back, excellent for me :) and if the motors are the same then I should be able to just slip the new wheels onto the old motors. If that works, PK will end up looking signifigantly different.
The best part of this all? All of the above was purchased for a grand total of 25 US dollars. Not too freaking shabby considering that is the price for ONE meter of LED strip from sparkfun.com and if you want 5 meters? $120. Granted, they have more LEDs and each individual one is addresable, not every 6, but still. Quite the deal I'd say.
Well thats really all for now, once I get something done on my projects, ill post the proof :) Happy Hacking!
I have decided to call my large outdoor robot using the power wheels motors Project Killzone, because it will be my first weaponized robot (first with a paintball gun, and perhaps later with a small potato cannon). A couple of weeks back, I purchased some 10" I think pneumatic wheels and tires, with bearings set into them, as well as a 5" castor for the back (or possibly front, I still have not decided if I am going to make it a taildragger, or have a nose wheel) with the intention of fabricating an adapter plate that would bolt onto the 4 bolts holding the hub of the wheel together, and have the 6 (later changed to just 4, due to spacing issues) bolts sticking up to fit into the depressions of the drive motors. I have acecss to a CNC plasma cutter, so I decided to use it to fab the adapter plate. I designed the plate, and after a few false starts (see the pictures) I had 2 nice adapter plates:
The wheels also have a slightly larger ID than the power wheels axle, so some bushings were made to correct that. Here is a pic of all the things that were fabbed this weekend:
These are some photos of an adapter plate bolted onto the wheel:
And here is the whole bot as it sits, the metal tee in the middle of the axle is where the tail (or nose) wheel assembly is going to go, the tee is 1/2", as is the pipe nipple. The pipe nipple has been reamed out to a nice ID, where a metal rod fits in nicely, the metal rod goes out, and has a dogleg bent into it, in order to make the end where the castor will mount (the castor's mounting plate is a little higher than the main axle) higher. I shall weld the end of the rod that the castor is to be mounted to to a metal plate with the same dimentions as the mounting plate on the castor, and holes drilled into it for the castor to mount on. The PVC fittings are for the rest of the frame, the +s to make the outer frame and the tees will go straight up for mounting a paintball gun, compass sensor, GPS antenna, etc. on. I still plan to use the stainless dishwasher cover as a baseplate to bolt on after the frame is made.
I went to a garage sale yesterday and picked up some cool robot-stuff, couple 12 and 24v gearhead motors, a big air selonoid with a control valve with a 120vac air pump (vac/blow), a small camera of some sort and a few bags of roller microswitches:
That there is a beefy 12 v gearhead motor:
All of that stuff cost less than $10 for the lot of it, man I love garage sales :)
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.
I have a Spyder Victor paintball marker, and it is not a bad gun really, it was pretty cheap, and it gets me out on the field. I love my spyder, but I used to wish I had a longer barrel, the stock one was just not cutting it. I am a bit poor right now, and I balked at the ~$40 price tag of a nice barrel. Having just built a paintball cannon for my friend, I knew that 1/2" class 200 (thin walled) pipe fit .68 cal paintballs just fine, I also have acess to a lathe, so I figured, what the heck, I will give it a try. I measured my stock barrel's diamiter, and the legnth of the part that screws into the gun, chucked up some pipe in the lathe, and here is what I got:
admittedly, the white plastic looks a bit cheesy, but I can paint it later if I really feel like it, and the price is right ( you can get 20' of pipe (yes feet not inches) from any self-respecting hardware store for less than $5) the barrel might be a little long, but I can always cut it down later if I need to. I fired a few test shots, and it seems to work fine, no chopping, and better accuaricy.
You might have also noticed that in the pic I have a 48cu.in. HPA tank screwed onto my gun. Also in the persuit of money-saving, I purchased it and the fill station you can also see in the pic, tank was ~$40 and the fill station was ~$20 from amazon.com and ebay respectively. The fill station screws onto a scuba tank, and lets you fill your paintball tank anywhere you can lug a scuba tank. I borrowed a scuba tank from a friend, and since I can get it filled for free, I will have paid for my purchases in 6 fills, not bad considering I plan to go more than 6 times in the future, and my a few of my friends who do not want to shell out for all the new stuff said they would buy HPA tanks and buy fills from me for ~$2-$3. Doing more with less FTW!
I woke up this morning, and found sitting on the dinner table my prizes from the LMR tic tac toe challenge Naughts and Crosses. I decided I would get a lot more use from a micro magician than I would out of a mini driver, so even tho I came in third, I paid the difference, and got a micro magician. Oddbot (the guy running the challenge) also threw in a pack of female and male jumper wires. When I get some time, I am going to have some fun with my prizes.
On another note, I recently made a paintball cannon for my friend, 4 in ABS combustion chamber, with SEVEN 1/2 in barrels coming out the front, looks like a minigun, mwhahahahah. Anyway, it is not working REALLY well right now, needs a chamber fan, which I have. I cut down a 120mm computer fan untill it had just a bit of clearence between the inside of the chamber, and the tips of the fan blades, that was kinda finincky, spent a while with a calliper and some side cutters to get that working. Now I just need to stop by radio shack and buy a 12v AA battery pack, and it should be complete. These Pictures were taken when I was using a Piezo sparker taken from an old barbecue laying in the dump, it turned out to be unreliable, so I swaped it with an electroninc continous sparking battery opperated sparker.
I also got to go to Spokane WA. on Sunday and pick up some robot building parts, 4 6in lawn mower wheels. The holes in the middle are a bit big to mount directly on chopped up cordless drills, but that will soon be remedied with some metal bushings I will fabricate on the high school's lathe, a cupple of mid size castors, a few small ball castors and a big hunk of epoxy putty (for making a hemisphere for the HOG drive I will make eventually) rounded out the purchase.I love Harbour Freight Tools :)
