I really just need a place to keep track of my day to day Arduino and other micro controller projects.
The interface boards
Today I will go over the interface boards for Project Pi Heater. If you're not familiar with the Pi Heater project, check the link above to jump to my last post regarding this project. With that out of the way. Let's start with the Pi Heater shield, it's the piece that goes onto the Raspberry Pi. …
Project Pi Heater Begins!
The house I live in was built in 1939. It's got a central heating system that's pretty much just as old. The old oil furnace was upgraded to electric, luckily. And it's got an electronic thermostat, but aside from that, the system remains unchanged from it's original design. There are more modern thermostats out there, that will run a preset program based on time of day/day of week. …
Project HotBox
I made this for warming something at work. And I made it about as fast as I could one evening when I had very little time available to make it. It's a rough draft proof of concept prototype. With that said, it works, and it works well. I thought I'd go ahead and share it here on my blog.
…Intelligent Steering Wheel
As you may have seen in previous posts, I have this fancy steering wheel on the Go-Kart. It's from a Logitech force feedback steering wheel, it was USB and was meant to be used with a computer for playing video games. One day I decided to take it apart and use it on this go-kart instead. …
Putting the brakes on
Well the good news is that I've got new video to share with you. But the rest of this post will just be a bit of a status update. Brakes, I've finally implemented the brake pedal. The wheelchair gearbox includes an electric brake, it's pretty much a spring loaded metal plate that clamps down unless power is applied to it. …
Kartbot Lives
I'm a little bit late on posting this, had some computer issues last weekend. But I am back now. I finally wrote a simple program to run the Kartbot for some initial testing. The program will eventually evolve from this codebase, but at present, it's missing a lot, and is a rough draft to just get basic throttle functionality, not much else. …
Introducing Kart-Bot!
Yeah, so I vanished last weekend when I had promised more updates. My bad. I half lost my motivation, and half just want to take this real slow and careful to avoid shorting out these motor controllers. It's a lot of voltage, and a lot of current coming out of the batteries. I'm just trying to be very careful.
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Power up test
I decided to do a quick (but not too quick) power up test of one of the OSMC units this evening. I plan to try to get the robot mobile this weekend, so I'll be posting a lot of little updates. First I should mention that I picked up some nice terminals for the high current power connections on the motor controller. …
Finishing OSMC
Today I wrapped up assembly of the two OSMC's for my robot. I don't think I've introduced my robot yet. That's still to come, I guess. ;) For now, let's stick to the motor controller. I mentioned in the last post, I omitted a few components to save money. Some of those were things like the 10 pin ribbon cable connector. …
Assembling the motor controllers
It's called the "Open Source Motor Controller", or OSMC for short. It was created by a company that's actually local to me, called Robot Power. As you can see from the picture above, it's dated late 2001, during the short lived "BattleBots" era. Thanks to it's open source design and basic off the shelf components, it's still around 10 years later, and still a very viable option for high current motor control. …