The "great" Mustachio

This one took a while but I'm happy. I started by assembling a kit I bought for the Pickaxe stack. It was rather satisfying to put it all together.

I then built a chassis around it. I knew I wanted the board easy to access. I also knew I was going to use the very cool looking SRF-04 as eyes so they needed to be properly positioned. I also wanted to build the whole thing so that parts could be swapped in and out easily so I had to use pins instead of soldering everything.

I used some Lego wheels that I glued directly to some nice servos I had. Connecting wheels to motors seems to be the weak point of most of my constructions, so far. When I first fired it up, I noticed that he did not drive straight. He's always leaning a little bit. In my code, I had him readjust every once in a while by taking a quick turn or spin in the opposite direction. It ended up giving him a bit of a twitchy strut that I find endearing. These things are what I enjoy most in building robots, I think. The emergent personality that comes out of mistakes and improvisation.

I was a bit stumped as to what the front should look like so I asked my girlfriend who responded, he needs a mustache and big teeth. She thought she was being silly but I listened and in the end, he looks great!

At that point, I ran into some problems. My sesnors were tested properly but as soon as I tried to use them in the full setup, it returned only garbage. After much pain and a lot of good help from the good folks here, I accepted that I needed to change from 3 AA's to 4 AA's. Doing that would mean rebuilding most of the chassis to accomodate the battery pack. I broke the bottom half and rebuilt it. I added a little drawer kinda thing to be able to acces the batteries but making sure it all looks tidy enough once they're in.

I also took that opportunity to add a small 0.1uF capacitor on my sensor to try and smooth the results even more.

I added a lot of different bits of songs he can whistle but since it's sort of kinda random, some of them are rarely heard and did not make it into the video.

I intend to work a bit more on the code but I have to say, I like the little guy...