A quick update.
I had to change the tires of my wheels, the o-ring I meant to use had a diameter of 40 mm and I changed to one with a diameter of 45 mm instead.
New wheel diameter increased the top speed from 10 km/h to 11,5km/h 😎
I've been doing a lot of work since last time and there have been some changes in the design as well!
After I assembled a couple of parts in FreeCAD I realized that I had miscalculated (in my head) the size of some of them 🙁
I had to flip the base plate upside down to make room for the steering cradle and remove the friction wheels, because they wouldn't fit anymore. I also had to make the propel wheel larger to get better grip and to make the ball go a bit faster.
The approximate speed is now somewhere about 10 km/h, which is a quite good speed I think.
The base plate front view - with motors and steering craddle and its servo
Another post is up, about the propel system this time!
I have this idea that the ball will be driven with a motor and a small wheel inside a bigger ring, with a friction wheel underneath.
Sorry for my bad sketch
Finally I think we nailed the printing tolerance measurements! We also changed from white to black ABS filament, which seems to behave more accurately than the white one does.
I added some snap connections and push fittings to the new test piece so we can see if the printer has an accurate repeatability
Today I got my first "missing" parts to propel my ball 🙂 I'm going to make a simple and cheap speed controller by using two 30A brushed plane ESC, less than $9 each.
A couple of days ago I got a mail with an attached film clip of the first printed piece of the skeleton.
The day after, "Dubbear" came to my place and I got it in my own hands so that I could look, bend, squeeze and feel the first printed part of my very first CAD-project!
We took a look at my CAD-files and "Dubbear" showed me that my parts wasn't made as solids. I had simply misunderstood how to build the parts in a correct way!
Later on I did some googling and it turned out that it wouldn't be as much work as I feared to fix the parts into solids.
It's been quite some time since I last wrote something here, before the last post that is 🙂 so it's about time I do so!
It all started when I saw a post on Instructables about a Remote controlled basket ball robot. I immediately started to plan how I could make my own - who doesn't want a remote controlled ballbot!
Since I've got a lot of R/C parts laying around I figured it wouldn't be too expensive to gather the rest of the electronics needed, a DC motor and an ESC.
In the instructable the author used a 7" (17.8cm) hamster ball as the housing for his ballbot. 7" is quite small if you want to fit sensors and other fun stuff into the ball and really make it into a robot, not just a radio controlled ball. Continue reading
I finally made some schematics for the TARDIS! I also noticed some minor design flaws, mostly aesthetical but no show stoppers! Stay tuned for v2.0 😉
The Schematics are a little bit different than usual. I made them on the top layer PNG of the PCB so it will be easier to see where to put the components.
TARDIS-monostable
TARDIS-astable
TARDIS-frequenzy_divider Continue reading
Yestarday I finally got my shipping from Seeed Studio! It's always satisfactory to hold and look at a PCB you've designed yourself.
As soon as I get time I will start to draw the schematics for as many circuit layouts as I can find for this PCB. I've estimated it to somewhere about 15-20 different circuits that will be possible to build on the PCB!
Also see: 555 TARDIS
I'm really back in business! This is the second PCB design I've made in the last two weeks!
I've had an idea for something like this for quite a while now, but a much simpler one.
Originally it was a three-in-one-design with a Monostable, Astable and a LED Dimmer circuit on the same PCB, with a code switch to select desired function.
Now it's more some kind of an experiment board for the 555 IC, about 15-20 different circuits are possible to make. Continue reading
