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.
Robot view 1


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. Now that Jason of Roboticsconnection.com hasmade available a really excellent XBee 'HowTo' there is no reason to hold back. 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.

Roboticsconnection.com Serializer WL view


This next overhead view gives more details of the layout.



Back to Don's Robot home.

© , 2009

Created:4/25/2009, by Don Lewis