As you know I'm getting the YDM built by a local uy and he emailed me this question that I cannot answer. Really would appreciate some help.
I assembled the chasis over the holidays, bought a whole lot of stuff (have receipts) including the shaft for the front axle, etc. but I came unstuck as to what is the program to put in and what pin to wire what. I have not taken a picture but can do so tonight when I get home. My objective is to get a robot built for you ASAP and not to tinker, play and program.
I understand you are in good relationships with the original person who build the LDM. Could you get him to send the program and a pin out of what goes where on the Picaxe board please? I am also a little puzzled as to whether he used the motor driver chip to drive the servos and save the drive chip for the track motors. I am also a little uncertain which side of the switch did he connect to the logic pin on the Picaxe board for the sound sampler?
For starters, I believe the motor driver chip is to directly drive the track motors, the servo would be from an IO pin and the drum stick motors would be activated from the “drive chip” also called the darlington driver. The sound sample board and sonar trigger would also be from IO pins as well (whatever are not being used by the darlington to drive the drum beat motors.) Which ones are being used can be interpreted from the code, or improvised then modify the code to fit.
There is no servo YDM’s head is on a geared pager motor, just like the drumsticks. It’s controlled via two i/o pins connected to an extra motor driver.
Thanks for tha information. I just read Frits profile before your post and was not thinking. I shouldn’t have expected free tech support when I don’t even contribute on this site. (never even built a real robot…yet)
I will wait for my funds to transfer to Paypal before I ask anymore questions. I’m really anxious to demonstrate Frits robot to students and will post a video when finished.
Pretty cool, hadn’t gotten that Had not realized the sonar head was run by a pager motor. So the spring return will “center” the head? That is pretty cool, had not figured the spring would return from either direction, I ought to get a couple of these to play with. Maybe some year, anyways.
Only problem that I’ve found Only problem that I’ve found is the head turns too wide for me. I’ve been putting it off, but I really need to figure out how to make the distance it turns a lot less.
Yeah, I had the same problem on my Little Drum Machine, and you can see some discussion of it on the page. I tried gluing little plastic bits to limit the travel in each direction, and it worked a little better, but it quickly broke them off. With a little more reinforcement that approach might have ended up working, but I took the “easy” way out and replaced the GM10 with a micro servo, and that made it MUCH easier to find my targets. But it does lose some of the “soul” that YDM had, with its quick-darting head.
