Loki's Head
Loki's control interface
Loki grew a head recently in order to support some experiments with stereo vision. The two lasers are for other tests :)
I would like you to sit on
I would like you to sit on it, and then I could remote you around! 
/ Fritsl
This could be arranged …
the control page will be up soon 
Regarding powering this thing…
Hey grog!
This is an awesome project and it was fun to read about how the robot crashed into your cabinet and all :-). I’m particular interested in the way you’re powering the robot since I would like to do that whole mini-itx thing myself. After reading about the picoPSU it seemed that it needs 12 volts regulated? Do you just connect the battery directly or do you have some voltage regulation between picoPSU and the battery?
- Jimmy
Regarding powering this thing…
Regarding powering this thing…
Thanks!
I specialize in failures - you’re garanteed to learn something from it.
The pico is working great for me so far.
Since all the car manufacturers want to put computers in cars now, it has become very simple. The pico PSU 120 hooks directly to a 12 volt battery. So 12 volts on one side, then you plug that little gizmo directly into an standard ATX connector on a motherboard! Very nice!
I have found that when the battery drops below 11 volts, the pico will cut power completely (probably a good thing - when you underpower things - they typically start get HOT).
I re-routed the motherboard fan and disk power to go directly to a battery, i figgured this would be more efficient (even though pico runs @95% efficiency)
Here’s a link to the specs http://resources.mini-box.com/online/PWR-PICOPSU-120/PWR-PICOPSU-120-manual-engl.pdf. You don’t need to regulated it - You can put some caps on to filter out the noise if your powersource is the same as your motors powersource. I initially had my electronics battery and the wheelchairs batteries seperated, (the best way to filter out noise), however, i now have the electronics battery connected with the wheelchair battery - I’m doing this in order for the whole system to recharge easily… The wheelchair comes with its own battery recharger on board - now i just got to teach the bot to find the 120v outlet when its feeling low.
Hope this helps Jimmy,
cheers,
GroG
Thanks for elaborating it
Thanks for elaborating it sounds pretty straight forward!
How long does the robot run before the battery drops below 12V? I don’t really know anything about the curve of discharge for typical car batteries… do they hold close to 12V for almost all of their life and then rapidly drop to very low voltage or is there still a lot of juice left in them at a lower voltage level?
Those picoPSU thingies sure seem like the way to go when going for the whole robot-using-atx-mainboard setup, thanks for the info!
- Jimmy
Ditto, thanks for the info,
Ditto, thanks for the info, that’s something I’d always been interested in playing with too (powering computers from a car battery). I had some brief forays into ‘carputers’ for MP3 purposes back in the late 90s, but I was always using an inverter and the computer’s stock AC/DC power supply, and I’m sure that was really inefficient. This always sounded like a better way to go.
I also find it interesting to read about your work with those bigger motors, because that’s something else I want to try sometime – building something bigger, something that can drive around outdoors in the grass and stuff. It’s interesting to hear about needing to use PWM just to get those larger motors going.
Dan
When building something
When building something bigger remember it can hit you a lot harder if you make a programming error :-D. I don’t want to read the headline “Big Drum Machine beats the living daylights out of creator”
- Jimmy
Haha, I’ll be careful. I’ll
Haha, I’ll be careful. I’ll only give it Nerf bats and rolled-up newspapers until the code is well tested
Never…NEVER give weapons to
Never…NEVER give weapons to robots!
(I am just saying it, better safe than armageddon)
/ Fritsl
Apparently, not everyone
Apparently, not everyone believes this…
But I have to admit, I really like SRL
I’ve had computers where the
I’ve had computers where the CPU fan died, and all that would happen when it overheated was the computer would freeze solid and I’d have to do a hard reboot. Never hurt the hardware. But maybe I just happened to have a machine with the built-in protection Good luck with yours.
Dan
They had a streaming video
They had a streaming video at the end but now you have to download it
(not pretty - AMD goes up in smoke) - as wise man once said to me, "Once the magic smoke has left the chip, it is very difficult to get it back in"
Lol,Someone said to me
Lol,
Someone said to me "Current is smoke within the cables, where it should be.". "You can tell you have a leaking problem if some of it is getting out."
/ Fritsl
