Remote Control Platform

RC Plane Drop Mechanism (Bomb Drop)

2007-09-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

Been thinking about making a bomb drop for parachute guys and the like. Decided to do a survey of what people are doing and there are some neat things.

I like the tube, it is cool.

Nice repeat action

Simplest, and has swanky music.

Not a bomb drop, funny video that came up where a magpie attacks a rc plane.

Researchers Left Page on Biomimetic Work

2007-09-11T07:08:00.001-07:00

Now defunct they left some interesting pages up on their "Raptor" project that initially concieved was to make a dinosaur robot but became a humanoid motion simulation project. Page includes some solid models and links to relevant papers and vendors for their project. Just making a reference to it for later review.

http://trixie.eecs.berkeley.edu/raptor/index.htm

Solid Models Online

2007-09-11T06:36:00.000-07:00

I am getting to where I would make some 3D models of parts. I decided to do a search for models of off the shelf components like servos and came up with some sites.
I will add them as I come across them.

Lynxmotion.com sells robot components and robots, have quite a few 3D models, including std hitec servo.

Some robot models, didn't open them but have the link for future reference.
http://trixie.eecs.berkeley.edu/raptor/SolidWorks/SolidWorks.htm

And the 3Dcontentcentral, which is a solidworks site.
http://www.3dcontentcentral.com/3DContentCentral/

2.4 ghz Antenna for the RC Cam

2007-09-09T13:31:00.000-07:00

Did a bit of research on antennas, basically the more gain you get the more directional the antenna becomes. A interesting antenna that was made from a satellite dish and a bi-quad is shown on this link http://www.trevormarshall.com/biquad.htm
a builder of the style uses it to get wireless to his daughter at 1000'.

Commandobot Voice Recognition.

2007-09-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

Picked up a "vintage" voice recognition Commandobot last weekend. The kids finally wore me down this weekend to open the box. Not new in box but used in box. We took it out and were able to find the Commandobot manuals online

The robot itself is pretty cool for a toy, it will shoot multiple plastic missiles (4-6' range, very low energy), small tank tracks under the feet (the feet do not actually move), lights that flash, and he does talk. The robot also can ease drop and acts as a intercom of sorts. Speed is very slow, has "programs" for "guarding" and patterns. I think it is also supposed to perform "missions" where you use the keypad on it's chest to key in moves and attacks, but we could not quite figure out if we were doing something wrong or if that feature was disabled.

We took on the challenge of doing the robot training of the 18 commands, which had to be repeated twice to the robots satisfaction. It was grueling but N stuck with it. It took me maybe 4 tries before I could get through it and after getting my voice we had to go through it again to set it to N's voice. N is 6 years old and really, really wanted to control the robot. I think the idea of voice commanding something that can shoot "missiles" was a big motivator. The video is him trying to get through the 18 command words with the robot.

Buster Robot

2007-09-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

Got a new toy robot, and it's a Buster. Here is the general rundown at The Old Robot's Web Site. Buster was working except for it could not close it's arms. Another issue was that it takes 6C cells.

Some pics of the dissasembly and repair.

Took Buster apart and cut out the battery compartment to hold a 7.2v rc battery pack, and added a standard connector for it. Disassembled the the arm unit and found that one of the posts for a gear in the gear box had broken. Was able to fix that with some 3M potting compound. Even fixed the arm does not have much clamping force and cannot lift much without popping the clutch.

Remote Control Camera

2007-08-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

Found a site where they sell a very cool remote control trigger for the canon A620. It takes 1 or 2 channels and plugs into the usb port of the cam to take remote pics and allow the camera to stay on so that you can have video transmitted back to base if you want. The one channel model will trigger the shutter and the two channel model does the additional function of controlling the zoom. This is way cool.

http://www.blip.com.au/item.aspx?itemID=14

This guy bought one and hopefully will give some more info on it. He apparently uses a rc plane to chase storms!

http://stormchaserco.blogspot.com/

Desulfator Battery Restorer

2007-07-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

Been looking into recovering some old batteries I have that have come with scooter bargains I have gotten.

Some links to battery desulfators:
http://www.shaka.com/~kalepa/desulf.htm
http://p198.ezboard.com/NEWBIES-START-HERE/fleadacidbatterydesulfationfrm8

http://www.theworkshop.ca/energy/desulf/desulf.htm

http://www.shaka.com/~kalepa/gbook.htm

Plans and Schematics

http://www.shaka.com/~kalepa/lowpower.htm

http://www.shaka.com/~kalepa/highpower.htm

Robots, They seem so nice!

2007-07-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

Yeah, seem real nice, but how long before they come at you with the kitchen cutlery?

http://anybots.com/abouttherobots.html

Electric Tractors

2007-06-10T06:14:00.003-07:00

I have wanted a Elec-Trac GE for a while, I think I missed the boat, the ones available are usually pretty expensive if in good condition(if you can find one somebody will part with) and the junky ones are usually expensive and are not really worth anything except for some spare parts. The pic is from http://www.econogics.com/ev/robotrak.jpg

I totally like the idea of an electic tractor. Regular garden/farm tractors are pretty noisy. I suppose there will be a certain amt of noise associated with mower decks and the like but I think a quiet vehicle like this would be awesome.

Found some links and here they are:

Electric Tractor Inventory

Jim Coate's page on elecric tractors

Links to electric tractor manufacturers and electric yard tool makers
http://java.cs.vt.edu/public/users/mlorch/Elec-Trak/index.html

Not exactly a electric tractor, but cool:

http://www.theworkshop.ca/energy/lev/fs2000/5/5.htm

I am going to add more later.

Electric Scooter

2007-06-10T06:14:00.001-07:00

Nathan was asking me if we could make an electric quad for him. It is kind of a long story as to why he was asking but basically revolved around me telling him that I would not let him ride a gas engine quad because it was to big, etc. So I went to look online for a electric kids tractor someone had made that I had seen a while back. There are even more things the guy has done and cool stuff too unfortunately he has had to charge for plans. Though from the looks of it they are probably a deal at whatever he is charging. Plans are not my style, they are too restrictive because I work in Junk. Still he has free plans and very good ones too from the looks of it though I had trouble opening the one I wanted to see. Anyway I just wanted to look at it to see what size motor he use and what motor controller. Anyway the point is moot because I will be using whatever I have on hand, maybee a electric golf bag cart, or a powerwheels, or a electric scooter motor and controller I have. And all the work he has done could hardly be made up for on what he must make on plans really. He has some decent stuff on making evs, motor, controller , battery info etc.

Some other neat stuff I came across were a electric motor cycle done in a show called Gomi Style which I had never heard of before. Honestly I am not sure anyone has heard of this before. It is worth a watch. It's free too, well except for your time. He did have some cool ideas like making a "FREE Take it" sign to put on dumpters when he goes dumpster diving. Not origional but still cool.

This adds to my suspicions that there are people out there that have all the crazy interests I do, there is electric scooter vehicle info and alot of other stuff:

http://www.theworkshop.ca/

http://www.theworkshop.ca/energy/energy.htm

Another site with ev stuff
and bunches of links
http://www.evfinder.com/evsites.htm

This is a site of a guy that made his own version of a segway, pretty cool. Actually way cooler than buying a real one if you ask me.

http://www.tlb.org/scooter2.html

http://www.tlb.org/scooter2.html

Pic Basic Pro Buttons and LEDs PIC 16F628 Very Basic Programming

2007-05-11T05:13:00.001-07:00


Simple Example of PIC Microcontroller used to light LEDs with Pic Basic Pro using IF THEN statements.

Pictures of Parts for a Spot Welder

2007-05-03T19:45:00.000-07:00

This is the Solid State Relay, Rewound Microwave Transformer that I plan on using for my spot welder, hopefully it will all work as planned.

Microwave Transformers and PICS

2007-04-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

Made progress on making the Welder, and making useful things with PIC microprocessors.

Took a old microwave transformer and chiselled out (none to neatly) the secondary windings and put in 3.5 turns of heavy wire, 4 gauge I think (???) that I had lying around.

On 112vac it outputs 3.96vac. Target voltage is 4v so that is good. I might run it on 240v because the omron solid state relay I have is rated for 200-480vac, it does seem to work fine with 112v lighting a lamp. I think that to run it on 112vac will cut it's 30 amp rating in half. I have no idea how much I really need for the spot welder.

Pic Basic Pro seems to work as advertised and now I can actually program (clumsily) a PIC!

Pic Basic Pro

2007-04-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

Finally decided that the only way I could reasonably get into using pics was to get Pic Basic Pro. I learning curve is just to steep with the time limitations I have. I need to be using the pics not trying to figure out C or whatever. Basic is easy and I had some experience with Pbasic with the Boe-Bot. There is some stuff to learn with Pic Basic Pro but not unreasonably so.

I have successfully done the blink the led routine. I set up a SOS morse code program and instead of dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit it was doin a dit dit diiiit dah dah daaaah dit dit diiiit. after doing a bunch of things with the program it occured to me that the signal was inverted and it was flashing when it should be dark and vice versa. I swapped the high and low commands to light and extinguish the led and it worked. After thinking a bit I realized that a basic assumption I had was incorrect about the PIC I was using, I thought that if you used a high it would close the switch to +5v, and a low would open the switch to 0v/no connection. That is half right. It appears to put it to +5v on high and 0v/ground on low. What I had done was put the led to the +5v power supply through the resistor to the pin of the PIC. It would flash on the low command because it was going to ground. Amazingly my progam worked correctly when I reversed the led and connected it to ground.

I also got the ICSP to work. Last few dozen tries it just would not work. (ICSP stands for IN-Circuit Serial Programming) I finally decided that it just didn't make sense that it would not work when it should be no different in how it is connected on the programmer. I traced the wired on the programmer and it was identical in hookup as the ICSP would be on the bredboard. That left the differences. I have a 5 leds on the breadboard and so I disconnected all 5 and the ICSP works. It looks like having them hooked up to the +5v strip might have done it, after figuring out I had them hooked up wrong I rehooked up the leds to the ground and the ICSP works. Will see how it works out. So far so good.

Another milestone for me is to be able to do the actually simple task of hooking up a omron solid state relay to the pic output to flash a 40watt lamp. It is quite novel to me to potentially be able to control "real" power switching. The omron is rated to switch at 5-24v dc, to control a load of 30A at 200-480VAC. The lamp I am flashing is on 125 vac which is obviously out of the specification. I assume it is just a matter of not running anything over 15 amps or so (at half the voltage rated)

I origionally got the omron solid state relay to make a spot welder, but now I am thinking something like this might work as a on/off for the sherline cnc motor. I think I will finish the welder first though. One thing at a time.

Rad Robot Found

2007-04-15T21:36:00.000-07:00

Found a RAD robot out on trash day. No remote but otherwise powers up and goes through it's "boot" sequence of moving everything, flashing lights and speaking. Makes funny noises when I tried a 49 mhz toy car transmitter near it in hopes that it might drive. It didn't. Should still be fun to take apart.

Progress on Video

2007-04-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

Made some progress setting up and figuring out how to get the video to work. Breadboarded the transmitter and it worked. Started taking the sacrificial microcam for use with the rc plane and platform.

Driving a Stepper Motor

2006-11-10T19:20:00.000-08:00

Set up to drive a stepper motor I took out of a HP printer. I used a Parallax Boe-Bot Basic Stamp and a Darlington Driver 8-Channel ULN2803 DIP. The LEDs are to visually confirm that the input sequence is correct. Rather than activate one coil at a time, It is energizing 2 at a time per the nmb data sheet.

I did try sequencially running 1 coil at a time and it didn't work, it did twitch though. After using the nmb sequence it ran fine, but did get pretty hot, uncomfortable to touch. Maybee it is supposed to just run very short duration or maybee something in my setup is wrong.

Cylon Eye Sweep

2006-11-05T06:50:00.000-08:00

Fairly easy to implement, easy to program. 16 LED's don't quite fit though.

Darlington and H-bridges

2006-10-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

Got some chips from Sparkfun.com.

The first is a UNL 2803 Darlington Transistor Array which I hope to use to control a stepper motor with, I have 8 of those, they are cheap and if they work I can use them on the boe-bot or other projects.

Also got 3 SN754410ne chips, they are H-Bridge Motor Drivers.

Don't know if it will work but also got 3 C-PS2501-4 optoisolators with the idea that maybee they can be put between the motor drivers and the microprocessor. I really don't know what I am doing and the components are cheap enought for what I am doing. If they work it is fine, if not no big deal.

This is a picture of the ICs from a beat fuji finepix cam I just got.

Wow 5 months go by

2006-09-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

I can't believe the last post was 5 months ago. Well we did some stuff on the vex. Added length and put 2 tank track kits into service on the vehicle. Had it running with 2 servos and it was running sluggish, and was already slow with the tank tracks in the April configuration. The extra track was making it run less good. There is a feature to run 2 extra motors to get 4 wheel drive on channel 7 and 8. You just need to install a jumper to activate it on the controller. Anyway I added the 2 extra motors to drive the tread and it works pretty good. A maybee next step will be to gear it to make the vehicle run faster.

Working on the Vex

2006-04-23T12:17:00.000-07:00

Made the Vex this Saturday, and it is pretty spiffy, The gears give 4 wheel drive. The wheels are fixed but it turns okay skid steel style, in fact it spins in place, pretty neat stuff.

Nathan really wanted to put the tank treads on and so did I. We had to shorted the treads by almost half. They are short and a bit noisy but work great. Pretty solid for $15.

Taking things down - removing the extras

2006-02-26T07:55:00.000-08:00

I took alot of the hardware off the chair. Pretty much everything I was going to take off it that was bolted down is off. I have not decided yet if I am going to chop and modify the frame. The X bars give it some rigidity but bring the center of mass up for anything I would put on it. The batteries do keep the center of mass low and take alot of space underneath, so it might not be possible to make space lower anyway. I may just try making a enclosure or more likely use a old appliance case, maybee a old flat under monitor pc case.

The Anderson SB 50 connectors work but the new ones are a little hard to connect/disconnect. I think that they are only designed for cold battery connect/disconnect.

The battery tray is 8" wide by 12.5" Long. It takes two 12 v sealed gel cell batteries, connected in series so the motor controller sees the full 24 volts. The batteries that came with it were dead so to test it, I put in two old batteries from a ferrups ups. They hold a charge but I am pretty sure that they are near the end of their useful life. I am going to try to find some decent sealed gel cell motion application batteries. I don't know a whole lot about what makes a decent battery but within brand and type I will be looking for the best cost/ah. There appears to be a big jump in cost as you go up in size, probably because of the extra shipping costs of large/heavy items.

Their rating is 12v 17 ah/20hr. That is less than half the OEM battery, which is rated at 12v 40ah. I don't plan on doing a lot of hard running anyway.

Preparation

2006-02-19T04:54:00.000-08:00

The first thing I have to do is clean up the chair. It was in storage for a few years and is pretty dirty. After that I will make connectors for the battery. I purchased 2 new sets of SB50 Anderson Power Systems Connectors. They are rated at 50 amps and are pretty nice. The connectors are interesting in that they are hermaphroditic. They are not male and female plugs. That is to say the plug at the vehicle and the plug at the battery are identical.

I am going to scavange a pair of batteries from a surplus ups that I bought over the summer. The batteries are working but I don't know how much life is in them. They should do fine for the testing and save me the immediate expense of new batteries. Besides they are just sitting in the UPS unused, though it functions I really could not stand to use it since it makes an objectionable hum and fan noise. If I change my mind I can always get new batteries for that I suppose.

Motor and Joystick

2006-02-19T04:53:00.000-08:00

Joystick

2006-02-19T04:51:00.000-08:00

Battery Charger and Connector

2006-02-19T04:49:00.000-08:00

Battery Connect SB50

2006-02-19T04:48:00.000-08:00

Pictures before disassembly

2006-02-19T04:44:00.000-08:00

2006-02-19T04:43:00.000-08:00

Beginnings

2006-02-19T04:20:00.000-08:00

Plan
Make a robot platform that will carry hardware to run remotely under control that also has the capacity to do useful work.

The base platform will be a action 9000 electric wheelchair.