First Day Of School/My New Career!

I’ve reduced my hours at work so I have more time to dedicate to learning ROS and developing a few robotics projects which will be open source. Today is my first day of my reduced hours and feels a bit like the first day of school! Cue, photo by the front door in my “uniform”, a Foxy Fitzroy t shirt. :slight_smile:

Two projects may be of interest, my PiWars robot MacFeegle Prime and the controller I made for it. I’ve learned a lot from designing that robot so will be redesigning it from scratch. The controller just needs a few tweaks.

The arms have 7 degrees of freedom each and it’s powered by a StereoPi board. I managed to get basic control working using Melodic but I’ve learned a lot more since then and will be scrapping my old code and starting again.

https://neave.engineering/2020/07/17/big-news-going-pro/

If anyone wants to follow along I have a channel on YouTube where I’ll be posting updates as well as a Patreon page where I’m hoping I’ll be able to get enough pledges to go full time on this. Long shot but nothing ventured, nothing gained!

www.youtube.com/NeaveEngineering

16 Likes

I love the Johnny 5 styling!

What sort of budget did you need to put the robot together?

1 Like

Thanks! With the redesign I’ll get it looking much closer too.

The design very much evolved and I’ll have to make a BOM to be sure but gut feeling is around £500-£600.

1 Like

I just did a rough calculation and here’s the parts listing:

BOM:

Thing	Qty	Cost
StereoPi Deluxe	                1	$200
RedBoard+	                        1	$44
MonsterBorg Motors	        4	£60
Teensy 4.1	                        1	£26
16 Channel Servo Board	1	£15
25KG Servo	                1	£25
MG996R	                        10	£36
TowerPro 9G Servo	        8	£20
Filament (big 2.5KG reel)    1      £60
VL53L0X sensors                9      £41
i2c multiplexors                   2      £13

Total (with currency conversion) is actually £487 (~$620) which is a lot of robot for the price thinking about it! I made a battery pack using scavenged cells from laptops and a BMS, it’s 3s6p LiION but you could grab a cheap LiPO if if wanted, I just had them to hand.

I was honestly expecting to have a much higher number as I’ve been in denial about it if I’m honest! :rofl:

1 Like

Just want to chime in that I’m a HUGE fan of Short Circuit so I LOVE seeing this robot!!! Go Johnny Five!!!

Cheers,
Brandon

2 Likes

Ditto, if you follow my channel (and I’ll post on here) you’ll be able to keep up with the updates and build your own once it’s published :slight_smile:

2 Likes

unnamed

2 Likes