Friday, November 23, 2012

Wiring up Bob the Robotic Head #hackfriday

No, I did not forgo Black Friday shopping altogether for Hack Friday (the new day which one spends hacking things together).  Shopping started at 7:30 Thanksgiving with a trip to Walmart and also some online shopping.

Hack Friday started a couple months ago buying a robotic head.  It comes with two servo motors and two electric motors.  About the same time I bought an Adafruit motor shield to control the head via an Arduino.  I have not had time to wire it up with other projects like the Cylon Pumpkin.  With Halloween over, I wanted to focus on the robot. Helping was receipt today of another Adafruit order from this past Sunday when they had a 10% off sale for Hack Friday.  Just in time!

The head is driven with the motor shield's two servo outputs and two of the four motor controllers.  For now, a potentiometer is read to control the motor and a rotary encoder, interrupt driven, selects which motor to control (could be done with 4 potentiometers possibly better).  The motor shield leaves enough Arduino pins free (all analog pins and digital pin 2 which is interrupt controllable).  Eventually the head will respond to sensors and possibly talk via an Emic speech board coming from a sale at Make.

Making the hookup much more enjoyable is my new Hakko soldering iron - near instant controlled heat, making the old Radio Shack model seem so 1976.

Happy Hack Friday!

2 comments:

  1. You know the is the first step toward as the robits enslaving us and taking over the world! Or maybe the other way around.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, Skynet is already self aware, I am only it's slave

    ReplyDelete

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