By way of introduction, I have little experience and even less budget. But I do want to get into robotics, and I dig the SES because it seems like the sort of thing I could gradually build up over the years, much like my LEGO collection (I shudder to think how much that adds up to!).
But I can’t shell out $1000 to get started – if I could, to be honest, I’d probably buy a Robonova. I can shell out $50 or so at a time, and maybe get my wife to go as high as $100 for my birthday or Christmas. All other funds go into more mundane things like food, mortgage payments, and stuff for the kids.
So: what combination of SES parts and servos could get me running for under $50, or (if you must) under $100? Assume I already have a standard servo controller like the SSC, and no worries about programming it (I’m a software engineer). I just want to do something mildly interesting, that will give me some experience and servo as an excuse for buying more LynxMotion stuff in the future. Possible ideas:
On a related note, what servos should a cheap newbie like me be buying? Remember, up-front cost matters more than long-term costs (due to the nature of home economics). I see that some good bots have been built with HS-422. Apparently the HS-475 is stronger. Other threads here recommend the HS-645 or HS-6545. What’s the minimum servo you’d recommend for such a getting-started kit?
well, for wat you suggested, id say its safe to go with the HS-422, itd work with a pan and tilt (nice and simple) and many other things that you would consider as “Starter”, but as you got into bigger and badder projects, then you would most certinley need to upgrade your servos
anyway, a pan and tilt, as one of the things you suggested would be really easy to do, all it is
-1 multi purpose bracket
-1 C bracket
-2 servos
well, you would need to make up a base for that, not sure if Jim sells some, but you could definatley make one out of SES brackets
but then, here comes the problem, you need a way of controlling the servos, which the SSC 32 is perfect and amazing at, BUT you’ll need to fork out about $80 ($40 for the SSC32 and another $40 for the software)
There’s a lot you can do with a few 422’s.
Small-scale low-cost robotics generally center around a microcontroller and some cheap sensors.
If you’ve got a micro, here’s some more ideas:
Take your pan/tilt and mount an aluminum tube on top of it with a relatively heavy weight at the top (i.e. your camera or the bot’s electronics.)
Mount the base of the pan/tilt to a small square of flat stock.
Get yerself a 2DOF accelerometer and build a board to get your pan/tilt to balance itself.
Open your servos and modify them for continuous rotation.
Now you’ve got a pair of rugged motors with a gearbox and a speed controller all in one package.
Grab some photoresistors and LEDs to make edge sensors, line-following sensors, closerange object sensors, light sensors, etc
Grab some microswitches and make bump sensors.
I’m sure that the second idea is below $50, nix the micro.
If you can solder, you probably can make a three servo project for $50. Below is a link where I made a servo controller for ~$16 (but prices are up a bit since then). Kronos has most of the parts including some standard servos on closeout for $10. The other components can be had at Radio Shack. Single sourcing is important to save on postage. You can program your own servo control chips, but I’ve found that paying $8 for a perprogrammed chip saves a lot of fustration.
Welcome to the forums. I agree with them. One of the most simplest thing you can do with servos is a pan and tilt.
An idea: Check out RoboRealm. Its this awesome PC software that can use pretty much any video camera (webcams work well) to track stuff. You can make a pan and tilt which has servos controlled by your computer to track an object or something.
Minimum servo is the 422. Can’t get much cheaper than $13 a servo. Reason the 645s and 5645s are talked a lot about is because they are used in big projects such as walkers which need a lot of torque to support the weight of the robot. For simple things like a pan and tilt or robonova or lynx5 arm you don’t neen such strong servos.
I would really suggest using SES parts because you can reuse them in any project you do! They make great servo holders if you need to mount a servo in a weird position (just screw the bottom on to the surface you need it mounted to) and you can build anything with them.
If you like bipeds, I would suggest slowly starting to buy parts until you have enough for a BRAT. They are loads of fun and you can do a lot with them.
And man, $50 or $100? Don’t you adult poeple have like credit cards where you can like buy now, pay later? Robots are a great excuse to spend money
Oh, and about the RoboNova. If you want a toy then get one when you can. If you are willing to spend lots of money and time designing custom brackets then sure. But I think that a SES humanoid is much more fun. Sure it may cost more but the servos are much stronger(5645s) and you can easily expand on your original design. Want to add a 3rd arm onto your humanoid? Sure thing, screw on a servo mount to the arm and poof you got a 3rd arm. With a robonova, you would have to do a lot of redesign work. Somepeople (such as Matt Bauer) almost rebuilt their novas and I can tell you it costs a lot.
But yea, a pan and tilt would be the simplest cheapest way to start learning about servos and all this mumbo jumbo.
Sorry if any part of it was disorganized. My english teachers always said i need to organize my essays more. Working on it =/
Bah, $40 for software that only runs on Windows? No thanks. I’ll write my own software (and it’ll run on Mac, Windows, and Linux).
There are cheaper servo controllers too (like this one), though nothing I’ve found can beat the SSC32 in terms of bang for the buck. Still, in a pinch I can start with a $20 8-channel controller; it will be quite a while before I have more than eight servos anyway.
Thanks very much – that baby’s going on my birthday list! Jim should have a list of “beginner’s kits” or “budget kits” or just a master list sorted by price… I actually surfed the site for a while, looking for something like this, but somehow completely missed this one.
A little bit different from working with servos and such, but the below bot kit might fit your budget. I think it was sold at Radio Shack for a lot more than $59. Might be worth the price to get some of the parts out of it.
Thanks, that’s a reasonable price – but the BoeBot has never held much interest for me. It just doesn’t seem modular enough. I want to spend my $50 on something that I can imagine taking apart and building into something completely different. Maybe years of working with LEGO has spoiled me!
I would love to have an open source (or at least cross-platform) software suite. Any idea of whether this will be command-line only or will you make a nice QT, SDL, or GTK (if you really have to) GUI? I would offer to help but my skills are probably nowhere near yours. I do scientific simulation as my research, so C I have down cold, and my C++ ability is also fairly good. I’ve worked a bit with KDE and unfortunately they make cross-platform stuff almost as hard as Microsoft. (haven’t worked with the beta of 4 yet, which is supposed to be Windows native) The cross-platform QT classes are all different from the KDE ones, and cross-compiling with K-Develop is still somewhat painful. I won’t bore you with the details, but while I can create small KDE applications (on the level of complexity of say Konquest) in a few days, I’m just getting past the hello-world phase with cross-platform QT.
It’ll have a GUI, using the native Mac and Windows APIs, and GTK on Linux. (REALbasic does all that for me.)
I wouldn’t bother if I were you – QT applications aren’t all that cross-platform. They may run, but they look hideous – often worse than Java. For real cross-platform development of desktop apps (as opposed to, say, games), unless you have a huge development budget, there’s really nothing else as good as REALbasic.
I understand the budget thing really well, as I am on a fixed income. I figure it will take me at least a year to get my first octapod totally built, but I can do something with it as soon as I get 4 legs built.
No matter what you do, you will at some point have to shell out for a microcontroller. Kit form works if you can solder and can get a kit. If not, do consider getting one of the starter kits sold by Lynxmotion here. For $112.00 you get most of what you need, except perhaps a serial cable for programming. You can control servos directly from the microcontroller as well as process inputs from sensors and such. I’ll be doing just that next month and will be getting the Basic Atom Starter Kit and hopefully a few other things for my robots.
You could probably build up a small hexapod using 2 joint legs for a reasonable cost if you use the less expensive servos like the HS422. You could still pile a few sensors and such onto it and fiddle with it all, including a pan and tilt base.
There are also very low priced robot kits to be found around various places - I just got one I will be using for two robots, a small wheeled bot and one of my octapods. I actually bot a 3 deck robot kit with an extra deck. The bottom two decks will be my little wheeled bot and the top two decks are being used for the deck of my round octapod I am building. I got all this and 4 large buggy wheels for a little over $100.00 total. It was an excellent purchase! If I need more decks for the wheeled bot, I’ll just order one or two more at $9.95 each plus shipping.
There is quite a lot one can do on a limited budget with a little planning.
If you're on a budget, and want to still create robots, you might want to consider a Lego Mindstorm kit or something. It comes with everything you need to build a quite a sophisticated robot. I've built hexapods (with 1DOF per foot) that walks and can turn right or left and go backwards. It can only walk on land, and it wasn't as sophisticated as some of the robots sold here, but it's a great starting point. Seeing that you were a Lego fan, this might suit you.
I had the Lego RIS 2.0 kit (the kit that came out before the current NXT), and I had a blast with it. I even build a biped at one time with it. I opted for Lynxmotion biped scout kit because the fact that it has so much more DOF per foot/leg. But all these DOFs comes at a price. Lynxmotion is pretty darn fair about their prices. The servos that are sold here are the same price as the ones sold on places like towerhobbies.com or other hobby places. Where Lynxmotion stands apart is that they throw in free metal servo horns if you buy the 6-pack. I am quite a fan of LM...
My advice is, if you want some instant gratification, you can go the Lego route, if you want something that is raw and have the cash, go with the Lynxmotion stuff...
Possible ideas:
projects, then you would most certinley need to upgrade your servos
I’ll write my own software (and it’ll run on Mac, Windows, and Linux).