Don's Robotics Hardware Page
TracksBot
Posted Tuesday, January 27, 2009 9:21 PM:
There are more changes to TracksBot that I wish to contribute here. Having a rather large
piece (8' x 18" x 1/4") of Lucite acrylic I decided to make another deck for the Tri-Tracks
so I would have more space for payload. I have pre-drilled mounting holes and made
two servo cutouts up front. The second servo cutout directly behind the used one is in
case I want to recess the Pan/Tilt. I picked up the aluminum angle from Home Depot for
the IR sensors and other things as they come to mind. 36" of angle was about $4. When
the power switch is thrown to the outside the Battery charge jack is in circuit. To the
inside is normal RUN mode.
Having decided on low power (1mw) Xbee's the wire antenna made sense. The range is
good line of sight but weakens through walls. This is no problem for me as I expect to
always have the control either local to the Bot or on a remote computer nearby for
autonomous operation. The XBee are really easy to configure. Jason of
Robotics Connection has made available a really excellent XBee 'HowTo' there is no
reason to hold back using the XBee. You will need the USB adapter he mentions if you don't go all out
and get the XBee Dev kit as I did. XBee works very well and is very inexpensive. I
opted this route over Bluetooth as I only have Bluetooth in my Laptop. Also I can move
the XBee's to other projects later very easily.
This next overhead view gives more details of the layout.
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Created:4/25/2009, Last edited 04/01/2018 by Don Lewis