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My First Robot

My interest was sparked by the instructor in the office
next door. Little did I know! Then many hours on the
Internet researching many kinds and prices of robots...
Printing a file more than three inches thick of technical
information and prices, I finally bought the parts and
built my first robot, with design changes, of course, and having
enough capability to do the project on this web site.



In case anyone is interested, the robot is built from:

www.budgetrobotics.com
  Rigel - 4WD Robot Base (4 servo motors)              $89.95
  Gripper/Wrist Combo (Gripper arm with 4 servos)      $52.75
  Pan/Tilt Turret for Devantech SRF08 (2 servos)       $32.95
  My own steering with linkage (1 servo)               $10.00

www.acroname.com
  Devantech R145-SRF08 Ultrasonic range sensor         $57.00
  Technical Specification
  Beam pattern, FAQ

www.hobbyengineering.com
  Parallax "Board of Education" rev C, 
  with Basic Stamp 2, full kit                        $109.00

www.parallax.com
  Parallax 16 Servo Controller                         $39.00
  Futaba Standard Servo (steering front wheels)        $12.00

Local HobbyTown store
  6 volt, 1.8 ampere hour nicad battery pack           $37.50

Total cost without shipping and tax and small stuff:  $440.15


The microcontroller, Basic Stamp 2, is programmed using
PBasic on a PC and downloading over a serial port. The
microcontroller is a Microchip Technology PIC16C57 with
a Basic interpreter that can have about 500 lines of code
and runs about 4000 Basic instructions per second.

Once everything is operating, I will probably replace this
microcontroller with a 586 that has floating point
and lots of RAM and flash memory. Embedded SBC's

Then I can do software beam sharpening on the SRF08 range-finder
and be able to place the gripper a few centimeters from the object
that is to be picked up. The TS-5300 at $294.00 plus kit-5300 at $140
would be in lieu of the $109.00 BOE with BS2 used in  my first robot.

You can see that I do not follow the MIT slogan for robots,
"Fast, cheap and out of control." :)

Just like my first child or first car, I could not resists
taking more pictures.










FYI: One foot by one foot square tiles.

Credits to all copyright and trademark holders.

Last updated 2/8/05