Comming up NEXT! Somehow we are going to implant this 60GHz mm wave radar that gives my droid the heart rate and breath rate of a target person within 1-3 meters of the sensor, possibly further. STAY TUNED for the worlds first BIOMEDICAL DROID.
SUCCESS! Completed the LACT upgrade so the droid doesn’t wiggle with 1-2cm of play.
here is the 1/4 steel plate that is used to reinforce the 3/4 inch maple plywood
Here you can see where it fits and the black sharpie marker points that need to be milled in order to fit the new LACT mount which is 2 inches in width and not 1.75 inches.
Here you can see me drilling new holes for the 3/8 x 2 inch bolts which are replacing the tiny 1/4 inch bolts. Always use lock tight nuts!
You can see the lock tight bolt holding the mount in place so I can drill a hole properly aligned. It takes a lot of energy to mill this with a drill… I need my bench press back at home. I am getting too old for this, might actually break my wrist with this kind of torque. Be careful guys.
Ahhhhh…. Se la vî to the old LACT and bienvenidos to the new upgrade.
Here is an internal shot of the mounted hardware.
Internal shot of the mounted hardware. Using an 8.8 hardness bolt here.
Rear view of the droid’s new mount upgrade.
Satisfaction guaranteed baby!
The angle of incidence for the rear most angle is shown here with the new upgrade. This is the maximum angle the droid can take towards the rear direction. If you engage the 4” linear actuator it will push the droid nearly to the 100º degrees of motion.
Looks great, I turned on the droid and its working like a charm. Notice the LACT has been sent into the upright direction. It means we are successfully able to communicate with the hardware. You can use 2 ways to talk tot he Pololu Maestro and Pololu Jrk Motor Controller series, in this particular case I use the Arduino to speak to the motor controller with serial lines. I could have used USB serial connection as well, which is what I use to speak to the Maestro 24 servo controller. I love you Pololu, best chips ever.
SO beautiful guys. ROBOTS!
I love my droid. Will take it out for a spin and blog that too. It’s ready for some mountain testing and broadcasting. I can post the YouTube link to the VR camera as it will be broadcasting to my channel. Thanks for reading! Will keep more awesomeness going… I regret not showing you guys how to wire up the rotation plate with the stepper motor. I use 24v and communicate with the controller from Pololu once again. I use their greatest power stepper motor controller and I love it. The sounds are exactly what R2D2 sounds like. Speaking of R2D2, its a amazing to see how much of an antique his design has become. Welcome to the Future of Robotics!
I need to update the droid’s rear linear actuator. The old one was giving me a play of about 1-2 cm which is really bad when it swings the new weight of the arms. Each B1 robotic arm weighs 8kg which is adding a total of about 50lbs to the top of the droid including the head camera. For this reason I decided to update the LACT. Not to mention the bottom bolt which was 1/4 inch was snapping off with all the weight that is being required. it’s time to upgrade! I never remember to log these things so here is my attempt to keep you posted.
Here is a picture of the new LACT with the 18AWG cable cut to size.
Here is a pic of the old LACT. You can see the smaller size of the mounting hardware if you compare to the other pics.
Under that blob of black shrink wrap protection is the motor controller. You will find it is the Pololu Jrk Motor Controller series which talks to the microcontroller with the green and yellow wires. You can also use USB serial and I highly recommend this controller for powerful professional applications. In the next frames we will cut away the protection and install the new LACT. LACT has + and - and you can reverse them in order to make the LACT go up or down.
Here you can see 4 ports for wires. The outside 2 are for the power cables and cannot be reversed or you will blow the motor controller. The center 2 are for the LACT. We replace these with red on the left so that the code we already have works the same with no changes.
Here you can see the replaced wires in the motor controller
Use Electrical tape as we never want something to short circuiting there. its a garbled mess of wires and I apologize. One day I will be able to make a circuit board customized for this so that the wires are organized and manageable.
The bolt that mounts this thing is 1/4 inch and snaps off after a bit of usage. Very bad on my part to have made such a weak connection. It needs to be a 1/2 inch bolt holding this plate of metal that hold the LACT mount. If you look close you will also see 1/4 inch steel plate to reinforce the back. Honestly this whole thing needs to be steel, as I have reached the limitations of maple plywood. On the bright side this tells me exactly what to reinforce on the steel/aluminum droid design.
Notice how badly it was bending this steel corner brace
Here you can see I made a new corner brace into a u shaped bracket that will hold the new LACT medium duty mount. I ordered it just now so we will have to put this aside until it arrives. Patience.
Here you can see the upper stage being unbolted from the LACT.
Close up shop until the new parts arrive. I thought I could get away with the old aluminum light duty actuator holder or modify the original but you can’t. The new aluminum part costs 55$ and its 2inches wide not 1.5 inches so its more metal to hold the weight. its for the best and I should have noticed the size difference between them. It even holds a 3/8 bolt across instead of 5/16 so I need to upgrade the bolt at the top joint as well.
April 22, 2022 - Added the RPLidar, Amber B1 Arms, Insta 360 Pro II camera, Hecate speakers, Luna wireless display dongle, OakD-Lite 3d depth cameras, and the Mech router from Netgear called Orbi with 5G wireless capabilities. This was a very serious round of upgrades from the old Xbox Kinect camera and the tiny servos that were put as placeholders so as to buy me time to think about how to solve this problem.
Thud Moto's 2 speed dog clutch transmission. Working on how I can get my hands on a Pinion (http://pinion.eu) gearbox from Germany because R.O.B. needs an automotive grade german micro transmission at this point.
Went to the AirForce 2030 conference at TAMU https://afresearchlab.com. R.O.B. rode the bus from the parking lot, why waste the battery? Big robots helping little robots!
R.O.B. showed up to the WWDC 2018 keynote. It was in the middle of SanJose, CA and I didn't know the robot laws. I was afraid of getting a ticket or worse, getting arrested for this 100lbs Apple Robot that was moving down the streets of downtown along side my wife, son and I. It was sniffed out twice by the police dogs and the chief wasn't sure what to say either. In the end it was all a bunch of great feelings that a real live droid was present amongst us with all the latest Apple technologies to show off. Straight out of a StarWars movie, stay tuned for more updates from R.O.B.!
RudyAramayo
