When the servo turns, it turns the caster and steers the robot. The white blocks were sized to fit so the servo was at the proper height for this particular caster. I had a single armed servo horn that fit on top of the caster, which I epoxied to another single arm servo horn on the shaft of the servo motor. The shaft of the caster goes through a hole in the front of the platform with washers top and bottom. The steering mechanism for the robot consists of a single caster I had laying around. A servo is attached to those with a couple of screws. In the front are two white blocks made from high density polyethylene from an old cutting board. There are a series of posts glued to the back that form enclosures to hold the batteries.
The body is composed of a 1/4" plywood platform that is 4" x 7". And the wheels and some other parts were from surplus outfits such as American Science & Surplus ( ).Īlright, enough intro! Let's get to some of the details of how I built this. The motor, gears, etc., were just parts from my garage salvaged from all manner of electro-mechnical devices over the years. The Arduino, motor shield, battery pack, and various minor parts were all purchased off of E-Bay. In this example they are in two groups in parallel of two batteries in series that power the headlights.
It has room for two battery packs - a 12v 1800mAh that drives both the Arduino board and the motor via the motor control shield and a series of four 3.6v 280mAh surplus cell phone batteries I found on-line that can be arranged to run in series or in parallel as your power requirements demand. I designed it with the idea it would be a flexible platform to experiment with and to be able to add accessories, like the blue LED headlights, which is what the small green breadboards are for. My first robot! I built this from the ground up, designing the platform, drive system, sensor array, and programming.
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