Thursday 9 December 2010

30 and 40 minute robot

I'm posting two stages at once because the photo upload tool on blogger was broken the other day. Anyway, here is the progress on the '10 minute robot'.

He now has a bracket mount for the tilt servo. I actually wasted 30 minutes trying to make this out of steel before realising that my lab's workshop hand-drill wasn't up to it. After giving up on that bit it only took 10 minutes to make this aluminium bracket out of scrap.


And here's a pan servo. Both degrees of freedom have been aligned with the sensor's center of rotation. Of course, mechanical offsets can be dealt with mathematically via trigonometry, but right now I wanted to solve this problem mechanically rather than in code.

 

Wednesday 1 December 2010

20 minute robot

Yesterday's '10 minute robot' with another 10 minutes work.



Now he's got pitch rotation instead of yaw. I've used an angle bracket to keep the center of rotation in-line with the center of the IR sensor (his eyes). It doens't look as cool as his original neck, but it's more functional in terms of sensing.

Beats reading web comics for procrastination!