Well, it’s been a long time since the last post. There have been just too many assignments, tests, summatives, (and in a couple of days) exams for me to focus on robotics. Anyway, with the small amounts of time I had lately, I’ve managed to throw together the latest project of ours: the aptly-named SuperUltraPwnageExplodoRobot (otherwise known as the shorter recursive acryonym of SUPERbot). Here’s an update of what it can do so far, and what we plan to make it do in the future.
Right now the motors work. Yes, that’s right, all four of them. And the LiPo battery has *not* exploded yet, even though I’m sure it will one of these days. A couple times when I was changing the wires around, I mistakenly short-circuited the whole thing… thankfully I smelled the smoke from the almost-burnt-out voltage regulator to know that something was wrong, then quickly disconnected power. And when I felt the voltage regulator, it was REALLY hot. But the LiPo battery was robust enough to hold up to this abuse.
After working out all the problems with the basic movement operations of the bot, we started to move onto the upper layer of it. We’re still in the process of making the second layer of the robot with all the sensors, feedback, RF communication, and control. But for now, the first layer with power and motors works wonderfully. I think it’s a good start.
Let’s take a mini-tour around the SUPERbot:
An overview of the first layer of our bot.
The back of the robot. Here you can see the small 2-cell 7.4v 800mAh LiPo attached with Velcro, our green power LED, and the really enticing power switch.
This is the main power connector for the SUPERbot.
The mini-breadboard that controls the robot’s power.
In the future…
What’s coming next to our robot? I’ll leave you with this image:
Oooh?! Is that an XBee?! Stay tuned to find out!
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