Robot 1 - Alfie

Hi LMR, first of all I'd just like to thank all of you for this awesome site - I could never have got into robotics if I hadn't discovered this!

Anyway, Alfie is my first ever robot, and although I have done a little programming before, he is also my first experience with electronics, soldering, all of this stuff really. I kept him fairly similar to the start here robot, just omitted the servo and added a downward facing sensor so that he doesn't fall of tables. The chassis is made out of plexiglass/acrylic/whatever you care to call it. I made the mounts for the motors and the SRF05 out of some little bits of scrap metal I had lying about. It's not terribly neat as I used my dad's virtually blunt hacksaw to cut everything, and most of the screws don't quite fit as they were salvaged from various broken electrical appliances that I took apart.

As I had never soldered before, I was a little nervous about ruining the circuit board and dripping hot molten solder everywhere, but it was actually alot easier than I anticipated and everything went very smoothly. The programming was very simple as I didn't want to try anything too complicated on my first robot.

By the way, on the first part of the video, Alfie judders a little when going backwards, as I hadn't yet fixed a slight problem with the wheels. This is fixed on the second part.

Pictures are below -

all the stuff :-)

assembled the base

soldered pins

attached the board

attached the wheels

finished!