As the crow flies

This is another one of the small projects that I have going at the moment (very, very early stages). In the picture is a Devantech CMPS03 on an arduino board. This is for my work with electric wheelchairs. I know some kids with severe physical disabilities, and the control interface for the wheelchairs leaves a lot to be desired. It is a one button interface, the wheelchair can only travel in certain pre-set directions. Since this control system doesn't allow you to correct for drift in the same way that the joystick does trying to travel in a straight line is impossible which is really annoying if you want to get anywhere.

The idea is that I can use the digital compass to keep the wheelchair on a straight heading. I really want this to be something that I can just plug in between joystick and the motor driver, if the values coming from the joystick for the left and right motors are the same then the compass will correct for any drift.

I'm using the wiring library from here http://www.grapelabs.de/index.php?id=52

Hexapod leg

So after I had the rough plan for the legs done in the sintra board I got the first version of the design laser cut in 3mm arcylic. I was living near Brighton at this point so I used http://www.heritageinlay.com/

The design wasn't quite right at this point, some of the pieces were too tight and the angle of the leg was off.

I changed the design a bit and v2 of the leg should be ready soon.

Each one of these legs is supposed to be 2DOF and have a ground contact sensor in the foot.

Hexapod

I've had quite a lot of free time recently so I decided to try and build a hexapod. Now I could have gone and bought a kit but that's cheating.

I've been drawing the design in adobe illustrator.

This first prototype was made out of 3mm pvc foamboard (also called sintra board). The bolts being used here are mainly m4 size and the servos are some cheap Accoms AS-17's that I got in bulk off ebay.

My plan was to use an arduino and the software servo library to control a total of 13 servos. That gives me 6x 2DOF (Degrees Of Freedom) legs and a panning head for the ultrasonic distance sensor that I mean to use. As it turns out that plan sucked but more on that in later posts.

In the beginning

This is really just a test posting, I plan to start posting details of my various electronics, programming and robotics projects in the future.