SRF05 is still IMHO the best low-cost distance sensor.
And there is still no good / smart / fancy / easy / pro / cheap way to mount the darn thing on a turning neck / servo / front..
We now have a good contact to DAGU from China who makes cheap and cool robot-stuff.
So.. I thought.. Why don't we make some suggestions to how we would like such a mounting thing(ey) shaped and made? And then ask Jack from DAGU if he could start producing it?
This was my idea.. and now I need your help and ideas towards the design :)
I have discussed this suggestion with Jack, we both think if there are enough details we can produce the brackets.And it may also be available to your YDM, right?
But we are working with few projects now, so if you do not mind we can talk it in details about two weeks later.
There are a few brackets that are available. Lynxmotion has this kind. SuperDroid has a couple.
I think what I’d like is to take the Lynxmotion bracket, and drill the hole in the center out, so that a Maxbotix sonar could be mounted there. It might be nice to have the bracket in a clear lexan rather than metal, but that is not necessary. The servo mounting is pretty critical. And I’d actually like to see the Sharp mounting as vertical rather than horizontal.
Found an interesting mount at Roboddyssey. Not readily apparent, but one flat piece attaches to the robot or a servo, the other attaches to the sensor, and the curved parts bolt into the edges to serve as a side bracket to aim the sensor at any angle from straight up to 45 to straight forward. Cool idea, but not sure it’s $10 cool.
Could we apply the same design priciple to a product whose purpose is to connect two servos perpendicular to one another such that they provice two degress of freedom to … whatever the thing is which is attached to the other end?
I think this would mka e great "other" LMR product.
Good idea. We could base it on the same design. Modifying a single bracket from the DAGU sensor mount so that is can solidly mount a servo without anything interfering with a servo horn attachment.
If you look at the picture 4 in the image below of Oddbot’s mini servo mount for the DAGU sensor bracket, it might be as simple as removing the sides of the bracket, and providing a mounting point for the “horn” side of the servo. You would leave the top bracket off entirely.
Ok… Did you just make that drawing to make that comment?
Serious respect if so!
Anyway, mu humble contribution, from project TIRDNKWIIT (wrongly pronounced by some as “turd’n quit”), this close up, that I just thought may be of some inspiration:
Yes! This is EXACTLY what I’m talking about. This is similar to what I did in my biped. The standard cheap R/C servos we mostly seem to use on LMR definitely needs a bearing on the opposite side as per Frits’ working model.
What I propose is two versions of what Frits made: one identical to the above and another where the servos are rotated 90 degrees to one another in the x axis of his photo.
…or maybe just one which can be manually rotated in the middle.
This would form the joints in robot arms and legs, the joints between sections of caterpillars (or snakes), 2D pan/tilt heads. Armed with a fistfull of inexpensive servo couplings like these, there are no limits.
Here's my version. It was a surprising pain in the ass to cut those holes out of aluminium accurately.
Here, a long time after these nice things are released, and commonly available in ths shops, I see that they are now marketed as “Pan/Tilt” sensors.
And I hear from guys who ask me how to mount the SRF05, that they are not using this one, because they do not need Pan/tilt - just a nice way to mount on to the servo!
It would be a god idea if you marketed it as a Pan sensor as well. And I recommend that you in this promotional material place the SRF05 inside of the top bracket, facing outwards. Looks better, is more compact / takes less space, is faster in the turning… if it can be done, because I am yet to get my hands on one, still using glue
