I received a meccanoid xl 2.0 for Christmas and it has sparked my interest in robotics. I am completely new to this, but my goal is to modify the meccanoid to allow for it to be programmed in something beyond the meccabrain, to have voice recognition and to have sensors for obstacle avoidance and to track/detect human movement. However, I am looking to start small and just control the servos and motors at the moment. From my research, it looks like there are a couple of options.
use the meccacontrol software and an arduino,
replace the servos with something like the mg996r and use ez-robot,
add an arduino to act as a translator/bridge for ez-robot and the current servos the meccanoid uses
use the meccano library and an arduino. I do not think option 1 works for me as it would require a windows PC and for the arduino to be tethered to it. I am thinking it would be nice to have a raspberry pi that would be connected to the arduino or pololu so that the pi could handle the sensors and potentially allow for remote control down the line.
However this is where I am completely lost. I am not sure what to purchase to power the raspberry pi and the ardunio/pololu if I went that route. I have no experience soldering so would like something I can just plug in at this point. I am also not sure what should then be used software/firmware wise to control the servos or if I should just give in and replace with the 996 servos. I do not believe modification of the 996 servos would be required to make them fit as people have commented they have replaced with these although I have not really found anything detailing the replacement process. The meccanoid currently has 8 servos and 2 DC motors although I would like to be able to expand with additional servos in the future. I think I would also need something to power and control the DC motors as well. I believe the rechargeable battery pack that comes with it is 6v. I am not concerned with the programming piece as much as I am familiar with a variety of scripting languages including python as well as C. I will continue to research but any insights or advice would be appreciated.
I’ll be buying the EZ-B v4 Robot Controller as soon as it is available @ RobotShop. By the way, they have the best pricing & FREE shipping…
How are you doing with your project?
Let’s keep the communication going.
Bye for now,
pcdoc
My son and I are doing this right now with the Meccanoid g15 ks that he got 2 years ago. He took the whole thing apart and to start with we are using the wheel base platform the the robot stood on. All of the pieces that made up the meccanoids arms, legs, etc can be re-shaped to make a tank like frame.
To control the wheel base platform we are using the DFRobotshop Rover v2! So it’s no longer “Meccanoid” it is Rover v2 with very powerful wheels. My son was driving it across the kitchen floor earlier and he put several objects in front of it to see how much weight it could “push”. He also stacked several items on top to see how much weight it could carry.
I will post some pictures in a few days once we decide how we are going to mount the Rover on the wheel base securely and finish the tank like frame. Right now there are just a few screws and duct tape holding everything together.
We also plan on using those smart servos for an arm or something as well.
This little guy is actually super fun to play with! My brother brought it to me to mess with, and we decided to throw an arduino on it. So i guess i did your option 4. However, it turned out arduino could pretty much do whatever ya want, like it could read sensors pretty well and im sure ya could throw some IR sensors or something for remote control. As far as programming went, luckily the site had an arduino library for it, however it was kinda hard and messy to use, so i wrote my own object oriented version using the original as a reference. If yall want, i threw it up on my github and documented, its my first library. (:
If you are interested in using a Raspberry Pi instead of an Arduino, I’ve got a set of drivers written in Python that you can clone and modify. https://github.com/rvanderwall/RolyRobot
