I really just need a place to keep track of my day to day Arduino and other micro controller projects.
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.
…
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. …
Christmas Ornament
This was supposed to be a really simple project. The idea was take an ATTiny85 chip, which costs all of $1.50, add in a shift register which costs maybe 50 cents a piece, and I've got a way to control a bunch of LED's. In this case, I did 16 LED's.. The first one I soldered up didn't work at all. …