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2019-06-19 12:07 am
Hi,
I am self taught in basic electronics and programming (Assembler, C++, BASIC and have dabbled in some of the newer languages). It has only ever been a hobby as I never had a job in either of those subjects. My passion has been automation and in particular wanting to build general purpose robotic devices. An on again off again hobby over many years when real life wasn't consuming all my time.
One of my earlier projects involved adding POTs to the joints of the original owi arm as position feedback and a webcam to its elbow to locate and move wood blocks. These arms are really too weak, slow and limited in degrees of freedom to be useful beyond being an educational device. Back in those days I used the parallel ports to interface with my own digital circuits. Then along came the USB port and a complex operating system locking out all but the experts when it came to interfacing a pc to your own projects.
Attached are two versions of my first attempt at building a robot base. They were controlled by a laptop and used the K8055 interface board. Commands could be sent to them via a wireless keyboard. They used two 24v window wiper motors. The first one I called Jerky because it was controlled by h-bridge relays that turned the motors on/off forward/reverse without any speed control. The second version used a home wired transistor based h-bridge to make use of the K8055 board's pwm for speed control. I had programmed various movements and simple visual feedback when one of the motors failed so I never got to add more sensors and the robot base is no more. I have been looking out for a used electric wheel chair to act as my next robot base. Some things like attachable vacuuming devices or carrying heavy items need strength and power.
The reason for a PC controller was because it could be programmed in a high level language and the pc has other cheap developmental tools with plenty of memory and speed. It also has software for things like speech generation and recognition and computer vision (like RoboRealm).
After the demise of my robot's motor I obtained a used vacuum robot and replaced its electronics with an Arduino and motor controller to test out sensor and navigation ideas. A larger robot base simply needs bigger motors and a larger base as the same "brain" can work on either.
[url= https://i.postimg.cc/DzQs74FD/robot-Base1.jp g" target="_blank">https://i.postimg.cc/DzQs74FD/robot-Base1.jp g"/> [/img][/url]
Ok. The image failed to link.
In another forum I use,
to upload an image and then place the link in the text where it works fine.
For some reason this forum garbles the link data.
2019-06-19 12:49 pm
Hi casey
Welcome to the forum! I admire you for hacking the Owi arm, I remember seeing it a few years ago and wondering how I could adapt it to control it with an Arduino.
The format that you were trying to use to post an image is called "BBCode", however, this forum does not support it. I'm about to add a facility to allow images to be uploaded directly to the forum, it should be active soon. You can already link to external images, I'll be adding a feature that allows easier embedding plus the embedding of video, again this will be very soon.
Thanks for signing up, look forward to hearing more from you.
Bill
"Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window." — Steve Wozniak
2019-06-19 1:01 pm
Casey, I see the url for your robot image has a space between the p and g, at the file extension name. I removed that space and the link worked well.
I posted the picture of your robot below. At least I hope this is the right picture?
The way I posted this was to right-click on your photo and choose "View Image". Then I copied that URL and pasted it into this post. That seems to work for posting images for now.
Nice robot by the way!
DroneBot Workshop Robotics Engineer
James
DroneBot Workshop reacted