Robots
- An improvement of Devilcat.
- A family of robots based on the Tamiya toy tread set.
- About 7x7" square. Models vary.
- 8xAA power pack, AVR mcu. Other options vary.
- In general, the TiggerBot II series robots are designed to be cheap and easy to build.
- This was designed for an Instructables.com contest, the prize being a CNC
laser cutter. It lost, and development was terminated. In hindsight, this
was a total waste of time.
- Named for the similarly colored cg fish.
- Mostly just a junk-box designed test platform for some new components.
- It is pretty easy to make perfect lexan disks on a router table.
- AVR cpu, 7x AA NiMH, 2x modified servo drive, stepper motor sensor pan.
- Seven is an inconvenient number of cells. It was supposed to be
six but the LM2678 wasn't happy about that, and eight wouldn't
quite fit...
- RC Servos are really noisy.
Logo (2006)
- Named for its slight similarity to the old green turtle.
- DC Gearmotor driven Vex treads, Nano-ITX PC, 12v SLA battery.
- AJAX remote driving interface.
- ~10-15 lbs
- Abandoned unfinished. The treads were noisy and didn't
have much traction.
- The lesson here is that treads with road wheels that lack a
suspension are largely useless. This is reflected in TiggerBot II,
which features three independently actuated road wheels per side.
The computer and possibly drive motors from Logo were removed and
used in Devilcat II.
- Synchronous-Drive Lego robot built with a friend for CS148 at Brown.
- Named for the sound it makes sometimes.
- Balances segway-style on two wheels using a MEMS gyro.
- ~7 lbs, DC gear motors, 24x NiMH AA batteries, 2 AVRs, ss radio modem.
- Sensor ring with 8x infra-red and 8x sonar sensors.
- Inspired by nBot
- I implemented a FastSLAM type mapping algorithm with Crunch for my
senior thesis at Brown.
- Named after the fictional character a certain cs professor claims is
responsible for feeding algorithms byzantine input.
- ~40 lbs, Mini-ITX PC, 2x12v SLA, 288WH.
- This was basically an exercise in learning to weld. Devilcat's weight,
sturdy steel construction, and 2 m/s top speed made it a problematic
experimentation platform.
- Named after Tigger.
- ~2 lbs, 20MHz PIC cpu, 8x NiMH AA, Tamiya treads.
- The drive motors weren't designed for that weight and it had mobility
problems and very unpredictable turning.
Other Projects
- Even a dirt-cheap chinese mill and lathe are immeasurably useful for robotics work.
- Probably the best robot nav sensor $50 can buy.
- I'm working on a scaled-down version of this.
- Various stuff from CS123 and CS224 at Brown.
WIFI Can Antenna
- Not as useful as you might think.
Linux DVR
- This unusually painted wooden box held a VIA MiniITX pc, a CATV MPEG encoder, and 2 hard disks. It served bravely.
- I had a lot of legos as a kid. This is probably more recent.
- This is essentially an old laptop gutted and reassembled between two lexan squares.
- That was the idea anyway. It was a severe tactical error to not realize how noisy the disk is.