Robot building: 1st post

Okay, this is my real 1st post.

I’ve promised my son that I’ll show him how to make an autonomous robot by the time he reach 9. That was 2 years ago. Now he is almost 10. That promise was never fulfilled.

Guilty conscious, I have scrambled for the past several months to find ways to get it done. Luckily, I saw one advertisement for a workshop on robot building for 9-12 year olds during one of the school holidays. I sent my son, and his cousin, for that one day workshop. It cost me RM125. There, they were taught how to build robots by using the LEGO Mindstorm set. Interested, I asked the instructor how much it would cost to buy one of those sets.. RM3000! I later asked Sasbadi (the agent for LEGO Mindstorm in Malaysia) and found that the minimum set would cost me around RM2000!

I feel that it was too expensive. And I was convinced that to make the robot from scratch would be more fun.

Electronics is not my area, let alone robotics. However, I was determined to learn and build one on my own. I own one Parallax Basic Stamp2 microcontroller, which I bought six years ago. One good thing about Parallax is that they have good website with a lot of information. They also have robotics teaching modules for their Board of Education single board computer (?). That would be useful.

Here is the plan for the robot that I would like to make. I used a cheap radio control car as the base with all the drive motor, steering motor, wheels, and the chassis. This cheap RC car employs DC motors only. There is no servo motor. I will have to figure out how to drive this motors.

Since it is based on a RC car, I need to figure out how the robot would have to maneuvre e.g. through obstacles etc. with a slightly different technique as opposed to using 2 servo motors.

I plan to have photo sensors to make the robot either folllow or run away from bright light.

I will put the detail of the parts list in the next post.

First Post...

Coming up next.....

plan, parts list, construction and experience of my first robot ... kalau projek tak terbengkalai lagi la.....