Drumbot

Final Update:

Welp drumbot was interesting, I got him to the point where he could approach, align, and drum on objects, but shortly thereaftrer the gears stripped on one of his GM10 stick motors when the stick got stuck on something.  *sigh*  In any case, DrumBot is finished, and his components are now being reclaimed for a rebuild of igor :-).  Pics of that coming soon-ish.

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This is the makings of my drumming robot.  I know, I know, it's been done again and again, but hey I guess Fritsl started a craze :-)  Anywho, I am using a stripped down toy tank chassis as the base, an Arduino for the brains, a solarbotics L298 board to drive the tread motors and a custom SN754410 board I made to control the sticks, which are very much like the ones from LDM, GM10's with 1/4" aluminum tubing.  For the sonar, I am using a parallax PING.  I am still figuring out exactly how I want it to go together, but this is the basic bits of it....

UPDATE: 10/4/2008 -

I got some time in with the glue gun today, and got DrumBot mostly assembled.  I wrote a quick test program to test out my wiring, and the servo, the PING, and the 2 drumsticks work great.  The drive motors work, however the arduino resets if I engage the both at once.  I suppose I will have to have a secondary motor power pack or something after all :-/

Anyways, once I work that out, Drumbot will be ready to roll, or maybe it's ROCK N' ROLL :-)

11/3/2008

So indeed he is underpowered, there is apparently quite a voltage drop due to the L298.  I will have to pick up a small maybe 2xAA holder and piggy-back it with the other batteries