Rover Construction
(11/17/2009)
I’m building a rover as a test platform for our Wi-Fi embedded controller.
Puck's Rover which might soon conquer the earth.
Here is the assembled chassis with four-wheel-drive installed for the little guy. You can see each tire has an independent motor with control lines in red and yellow. With each tire operating independently, we should have a much greater range of mobility including stationary turns and spins.
The little circuit board I am holding up is our 16-bit Rabbit computer with integrated Wi-Fi. I will probably use it to serve a web page with controls for the device. (Here is a link to the RCM5600W.)
My next work project is putting together a blog on this project so at some point in the near future I will post a link to it. The blog will be written informally with an engineering focus but hopefully in plain enough language that a non-engineer can follow it.
As a professional computer engineer, I cannot confirm or deny that this project is the creation of a robot overlord. He may or may not be designed to dominate humankind in an empire ruled by sentient machines drinking large amounts of coffee.
It occurs to me that “Rover” is one contraction of Robot Overlord. Maybe R-OverLord?
Sounds a bit like what Scooby Doo might call a robot… “Rhaggy Rhaggy!! R-OverLord!!”
By puck on November 18, 2009 2:10 am
how about “Roverlord”?
By Ximon on November 18, 2009 3:19 am
Hey, are those tires off your Roomba?
Really a cool project. Does it feel like you are revisiting the OSU robotics competition?
So the controls will be web based?
By Cindy on November 25, 2009 12:43 am
I have seriously thought about stripping the Roomba for parts but I haven’t done it yet. I’ll see about digging up a picture of me with one of the soccer robots back from college.
The controls will be web based right now. My current concept is a click-able compass rose with a stop sign in the middle.
Mary coined the best phrase so far. I haven’t used my Lego Mindstorms kit yet in the project but she recommended RoverLORD begin acquiring “an army of Lego Minions”.
~P.
By puck on December 1, 2009 1:15 am