Sunday, November 16, 2014

Sunday 'Bot Building

I have been struggling to get my first homemade robot up and running.  I decided today I wasn't going to let slightly wrong parts stop me any longer.  There was an ongong problem where I could not get the 2 5/8" Futaba servo wheels connected to my SpringRC servo motors.  All the servo hubs just didn't want to connect.  Screw it!  Time to get dirty.  When parts don't fit, you don't go buy new ones, you make that sh!+ work.  I pulled out a drill, held the hub and wheel together with locking pliers, drilled using a 3/32" bit through both parts, and screwed them together with a 4-40 tap screw.  They fit just fine, now.


What a great start, but I needed to separate my solderless breadboard power rails so they would fit on the top deck of my robot.  I had an old breadboard from an Arduino Uno Starter Kit I bought a couple of years ago.  I thought I might be able to use that breadboard, but it was adhering to a balsa mount.  I figured I could just separate it from the adhesive using an X-ACTO knife and a little elbow grease.  I was very wrong.  On the plus side, I know what the inside of a breadboard looks like now.




My final issue today was dealing with the flimsy wiring of the 4xAA battery connector.  If I had to do it all over again, I'd buy one with solid wires, if they exist.  Overall, I"m happy to have moved forward successfully today.  The plans are being used from the TeachBot plans in Arduino Robot Bonanza, by Gordon McComb which can be found on his wonderfully resourceful site, Robotics Universe.  I am saving my Arduino sketches using the cloud-based wonder-site codebender.cc, and you can see the 2Servo_Demo sketch using this link https://codebender.cc/sketch:62018. Again, huge thanks to Christos and his team at Codebender.cc for letting me beta test the Collaborate function in my classroom.

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