We just received our Roboduino from Curious Inventor in the mail the other day.
It has been snowing outside since yesterday and today we woke up to an ice storm that shut down the city. All the schools were closed so it was a perfect day to put together the roboduino. We even put together a step-by-step tutorial for other newbies like us.
We received a whole box full of old modems and some DVR's from the guys in the warehouse at my work. They have putting stuff aside for us knowing that my son and I have been working on projects together.
We took all the components and board out of one of the modems and it looks perfect for our robot base. We are going to use tank treads on this one with the Roboduino. Plus we pulled out several usable parts from these to put on our stock shelf. I will have to get some photos up of stuff we have and see if anyone here wants to trade parts with us.
Extrusions are great robot platforms. I’m a big fan of PVC ducting! Yours looks like aluminium. That should be able to take quite a kicking on Robot Wars!!!
We also got alot of the snow We also got alot of the snow (I’m about 4 counties below you) and ive been doing alot of looking into controlling servos with an arduino board. However, this is the first time I’ve heard of a roboduino. It seems to be specifically made just for controlling servos, which is what i need. Can you elaborate a little on the benifits of using a roboduino over a regular arduino to control servos? Also, to program the roboduino, can you just use the Servo.h library? Thanks
We are new also. You program the Roboduino through the same software as the regular Arduino. Here is the info from Curious Inventor.
" The Roboduino is a Freeduino (Arduino software compatible) microcontroller board designed for robotics. All of its connections have neighboring power buses into which servos and sensors can easily be plugged. Additional headers for power and serial communication are also provided. The kits come with the surface mount parts pre-soldered. Skill level: Beginner to intermediate. "
When we built our first robot LARS (see post: http://arduinofun.com/blog/2009/01/12/lars-test-run/, we had to also build a shield to power all the sensors and servos, etc. Now that we have the Roboduino put together the next robot project won’t need a seperate shield. Everything will plug right into the Roboduino.
Thanks for the info. i havent bought a arduino board of any type yet. I have a REALLY neat project in mind. I am just "specing" out how to do it and what stuff to use. As far as ive seen the arduino is one of the easiest and most flexible things to use, especially servo control. Right now Im looking into what board to use, what type of servos to use and stuff like that. I read on the roboduino that two of the pins have a 16 bit resolution and the others have 8 bit timers( or something like that). I am wanting to control 3 or 4 servos. Ive seen other projects using the roboduino to control like 5 or 6 servos, so i should be fine.
