my robot
hey.. he kinda looks like something!
he's made out of joinmax servos and joints http://www.pololu.com/products/joinmax/0091/ along with some styrene for the chassis pieces. he'll also have superballs for his head and feet.
yep.. superballs for his feet. he is going to actively balance for real. none of this 1920's style walking robot via giant feet crap.
i've powered him up and moved the servos around one by one with a slider. they seem powerful enough. it was pretty fun moving him around and pretending he was really balancing. boy.. he is going to look sooo creepy if i can get him working for real.
btw. wtf is the deal with db9 connectors? i didn't like the idea of a normal thick serial cable, so i built a thin one using rj45 phone cable. the db9 to rj45 adapter i bought had numbers for the pins.. but they are not mirrored!! crazy. the even assumed that you where going to make a rs232 cable from it so the even swapped some pins for you. thanks guys. so after i realized that what it says is pin 1 on one side is not really pin 1 on the other side, i got out the meter and did it manually. what the hell?
i have a couple of next steps now.
i'm looking into some sort of remote link for him. i'm paranoid about frying my new computers' motherboard. i have a couple of options here, but i might kill two birds with it. my servo controller is only 8 channels and i already have 10 servos on him. so i think i might get one of these babies..
http://www.gumstix.org
with that i should be able to pretty easily get a wireless ( wifi even ) link going. i can also use the microcontroller itself to do all the rest of the work. eventually replacing the servo controller all together. i also would love to replace the servos and just use geared motors with my own pid, but i can do that later when and if things work out and i build my adult size robot.
as for those joinmax servos.. even though they are probably powerful enough, they do have some play in them. what i've done for the chassis is really strong because styrene is so freak'n awesome to work with, but those middle servo arms have some flex to them. maybe i can beef them up, or maybe even make some metal ones for the trouble maker components.
other than the basic hardware i really need to get some software going. the plan is to revive my robotengineer game and use that as the dev platform. at the same time i am going to develop the game. woo 4 birds.
now if all goes impossibly well i just might be able to go to robotcup http://www.humanoidsoccer.org/ next year. for 2006 it's in germany. it's nice to be ambitious i guess. luckily i'm a pro at that.