It has been an ambition of mine to make a small programmable robot for a while now and I have finally got the time since I left University. The requirement of the robot was to be purely hack-able. That means that it all has to be solderless so that I can swap and remove things easily and re-program it to do something else. So far the chassis is made of foam core. It can be picked up from Hobbycraft for £3.99 for an A3 sheet. The Motors are 6v-12v DC from Maplins (more on this later), and the wheels where cut from MDF wood using a circular saw drill bit (I don't know the proper name!). A solderless breadboard was a 'must have' for a hack-able robot which is stuck down to the center of the chassis. For the brains of the robot I chose to use a Arduino Uno, mainly because its small and I can take out the ATMega chip and put it into the bread board to save weight if I need to as I plan on addding a Raspberry Pi for networking type things. The Arduino runs off of 9v, so I am experimenting with a 9v battery for now but I am aware that 9vs worth of AA batteries would probably last longer.
Now for the problems! Due to the fact that I have no experience with robotics or motors, I did not realised (stupidly) that gear-less DC motors have no torque what-so-ever. Even more annoyingly, you cannot buy gears for them; well at least I couldn't find any on the internet. You would have to buy motors WITH gears already on them. However, it was more economical to just buy continuous rotation servos which have plenty of torque to get my robot moving.
I will post an update when I finally get my robot moving. I will be posting Arduino sketches and possible schematics for the robot. However, programming is my real domain so I wouldn't really want anyone to copy my circuits in case they're wrong, so I might not! I would much rather people comment and tell me how I can improve the circuit.
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