All,
I have completed the pan/tilt head assembly and very sloppily whipped together my first test of the pan/tilt head and guns tracking and auto targeting on the red target. Please check out the short youtube video. More to follow!
Mark
Good Job!
Looks like it is tracking pretty well
Kurt
Kurt- Yes, X-BRAT was tracking well but that was the very first time I had the code together and have since cleaned it up so he trackes much smoother now.
All- Please check out my latest Youtube Video of my first FULLY AUTONOMOUS TARGETING and FIRING system. This is hot off the press. There are several shots in the video where it was shooting blanks since I did not have time to put on a proper ammo hopper. Either way I hope you all find this video entertaining.
Also it was hysterical that my wife came down to check it out and happened to be wearing a pink shirt and she got shot in the head from about 10 feet away. It just missed her eye but she is ok and has a welt. I did not do any vertical alignment of the guns so it shot a bit high…she is not very apprciative and wants me to get the guns tracking better next time!
Quite a lot of excitment around here…
Wow, thats awesome! Great work. I hope your wife are doing fine though 
Just gave your video a 5 star on youtube. A video of walking combined with tracking would also be cool to watch
Looking forward to try out the cmucam too one time. Thanks for sharing you project, really entertaining and interesting.
Zenta- Thanks for the kind works…this thing is a hoot!!!
Here is another video where I’m trying out a different ammo hopper which falls off at the end! It works a little better but is still shooting blanks toward the end.
Mark
That is amazing how fast it’s able to lock on and fire hitting the target! Is there anyway possible to shoot video of the the onboard camera view?
Very well done.
Perhaps safety goggles ought to be required wear in your house! :shock:
In any case, those videos are impressive! Very cool.
(To avoid shooting blanks, perhaps a small funnel or similar could be used for an ammo hopper instead of something with a flat bottom? Just a thought.)
Looks great. I was just wondering what you are actually shooting. I probably need to get some to test mine out.
Kurt
Now that’s what I’m talking about! 
…and they said it couldn’t be done… 
Not sure if this has been asked before, but what servos are you using for the pan/tilt of the turret? It looks they’re having a little difficulty with the weight.
Good idea and a hopper could be made using the same container with a funnel placed inside the container, or mold a bottom tray that has slopes going towards the center orifice.
like this —> |_/|
This is incredible, nice job! Looking forward to seeing what else you think up! Very nice videos! Congratulations!
I was thinking about something like that. The solution may be even simpler…I notice that sometimes the bb’s around the feed hole stick to the double stick tape I’m using and that could very well be causing the problem. I’m sure I will solve it when I get to that stage.
Mark
Some not so good news is that I smoked one of the traces on the bot board when I was running both guns. Lucky for me the smoked trace was easy to fix as it was the power connector trace on top of the board by the VS = VL jumper. I tried a very short test after that and then smoked the motor from one of the guns. It is possible that I burned a gun motor and it started to draw too much power from the BB2.
I’m probably going to end up feeding the gun power to the pico switch relays direct from the battery instead of going through the BB2 just to be on the safe side.
The good news is that aside from the one fried gun motor all is fine with X-BRAT and I should have all of these problems fixed…maybe I should put in a 5V regulator to drop the gun motor voltage from 7.4V down to 5V…maybe even 3.3V. At 7.4V I’m shooting each gun at just under one round/sec so he is shooting 2 bb’s/sec.
Mark
What are the proper ratings for the guns? I’d suggest fusing your power supply or battery leads!
Alan KM6VV
Don’t think it has been asked before…I’m using 645’s for all of the servos including pan/tilt…I don’t think I’m having any problems with them handeling the weight. What makes you think that? The slight oscilations you see when he is tracking and moving the head are due to my code. I have not implemented a proper PID loop for the head positioning. The servo speed moves proportional to ammount it is ‘off’ from the target, but I did not do the derivative to account for proper acceleration and deacceleration in the PID loop. It was a compromise. I think that is why it ‘looks’ like it is having trouble. I just pushed it just to the brink of ‘hunting’. I could slow it down a little if there is need. I will cross that bridge when I work on better aiming and alignment of the guns. Only the first shot will be off a bit and in real combat the head will have time to stabalize for most of the firing.
Make sense?
Mark
Not sure…they sure ‘look’ like 3V motors and can probably be driven continuously at 6V…I think I’m pushing it at 7.4V. It may just be that one of the motors was ‘bad’ or I just fried the commutator due to the sustained use at high voltage.
Once I have it all worked out I will post the solution here. Like I said in the previous post I will have to re-do some of the power delivery. If the motors tolorate it I will hook them directly to the lipo battery through the pico switches and that will offload the BB2 as well.
Mark
No, there is no way to shoot video through the CMUcam2…well, not entirly true I COULD grab the PAL video stream off the camera (which is in B/W btw) and record that but it would be a royal pain.
You just gave me a good idea though…I have one of those micro stick cameras which I could mount it next to the CMUcam2 and then I could use that to show what the CMUcam2 sees…great idea! I will do that as soon…
Mark
We’ve only used the guns with 6vdc NiMH. I’d put a 5-6vdc vreg on the bugger. I wouldn’t sweat the 645’s they seem to be doing great! Again, nice job!
Thanks…that is what I will try next as well as offloading the BB2 board. That trace made a nice fuse! lol
Mark
Good news. Solved the motor problem. It seems that due to having to solder the motor wires on many times (since I was too lazy to hot glue the wires on the motors so they wouldn’t fatigue) I melted an internal washer that jammed up the motor causing too much current draw. The brushes and commutator were fine so it looks like running them at 7.4V should not be an issue. Now I just have to replace the motor on the gun until my next batch of guns come in.
All is well and this was only a small setback.
Mark