Mechanical: The original build took about 4 hours to get all the parts to fit together, but was unstable and off balance. After a few days of chewing on rebuilding the whole thing after unsatisfactory modifications, I tore it down. The final version took about 4 hours to build, cut acrylic for and rewire. The Tamya kits made the mechanical part of this one a cakewalk, and I still got to practice my acrylic cutting/drilling techniques making multiple base plates over the rebuilds.
Electrical: The arduino, motor shield, battery and motors all went together fairly easily. I soldered leads to make wiring easier and put heat shrink over more vital parts of the wiring. Nothing fancy. Added a piezo speaker, power switch and LED to the breadboard to indicate that arduino had gotten thru setup and to control power and show if power was on or off. I'm comfortable with basic electronics and probably understand it the best of the three!
Programming: My only weakness!!! 90% of my time went into figuring out how to get input conditions to control the outputs (I eventually did discover the sketch examples for switch-case and logic operators), make stuff beep/move and generally work the way I wanted, including PWM tuning the motors and writing functions for each condition for speed and direction of motors. Most of this time was learning to do stuff I had no idea how to do to begin with.
Next: Planning on using the base to make an avoidance robot. Then change over to a light seeking robot. Then combine the two to see if I can make it traverse an obstacle course to get to the light.
Proofing code and build for future projects. Room for servos/sensors.
- Actuators / output devices: piezo speaker, tamaiya dual gearbox and tracks, power LED
- Control method: Basic 4 button wired controller
- CPU: Arduino Uno R3
- Power source: 9.6V batterypack (should be 7.2V maybe even 4.8V!)
- Programming language: C
- Target environment: My workbench
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/basic-tracked-robot-proofing-for-use-in-later-prototyping