Once I got my 3D Printer working and had it dialed in, I wanted to do this overdue upgrade. Over time the tape got loose over and over and the motors started sagging so hard, that the cardboard dragged on the ground. This was one of my first designs I created and printed.
These two prints made the bot usable again since it fixed the dragging body as well as stopped the Camera head from constantly falling down.
Here a small collection of videos of my robtos doing stuff. I thought I need a few videos to show how they actually perform in action – but I realized that I didn’t really film them often…
Alongside Sparky’s upgrade I thought I want to iterate with what I learned so far on cardbot as well. I made a few changes already. The biggest one being the Tilt head I implemented for a time.
For that I first tested an old Mindstorms LEGO motor that I had lying around.
And once I confirmed that it worked, I strapped it below the cardboard cover and expanded the hole for the camera in the front. The result was a camera with the ability to look up on command. (since that is a simple DC motor I limited that to a “look up” function that lasted around a second) bundled with the LED I strapped on the Webcam, this improved the field of vision of Cardbot immensely.
Also note on this picture: I needed to add a second Motorhat so it could run the LED + LEGO DC Motor. Luckily those hats are stackable up to 64 in theory because they’re based on l2c.
But this didn’t last long. I wanted to improve it even more. What bothered me the most was that Cardbot didn’t have a gripper like Sparky did already. So I gave Cardbot a whole rework.
First I had to change the Headlight wiring, since I wanted to control that with a pin of the RasPi. That way I wouldn’t need a second motorhat solely for the LED which would be obviously overkill. So I wired in a transistor to feed the power source seperately from the RasPi pin to protect that.
This time I added a Pan/Tilt head for the camera and added the gripper seen in the pictures. For the gripper I needed to make space since it is designed to get pulled by the actuator rod and as a solution I put everything a bit higher up. This way I could also create my own screw holes since the material I used is soft plastic. So I just used the hobbyist knife to carve out screwholes.
And I had to switch to a normal RasPi camera module to be able to move it around like that. while it worked like a charm, I soon noticed that the ziptie and tape mounts on this bot are not the best solution…
My first robot! I were pretty excited to have all the parts gathered and be able to build it. I went for a balance of cheap and easy parts, which is why it ended up being on a cardboard box/bowl.
The whole design is based of ziptying everything on the box and then connecting the cables. I checked beforehand how long the cables should be ideally and cut them to size.