Thanks, Whit.· I hope the skid system doesen't generate too much drag.· I think that placing a caster on the underside will change the rake too much.· What started out as a nose fairing is now a chassis.· The Orangutan will be changing rides soon if this works.· P.S. Sucess to your Gatorbots!
Recycle the free items that are almost weightless. They're great for
traveling and moving. Plastic parts such as tableware, jars, lids,
inserts, insulators, caps, containers, liners, straws, plastic sheets,
headers, cords, thread, rope, packaging, office supplies, clips,
clothes hooks, hangers, cardboard, sprayers, small discarded
items, old toys, pens, wire, forms, tape, rubber bands, elastic,
fabric and leather pieces, springs, coils, magnets, plugs, auto
parts, old clocks and radios, tvs, vcrs, tubes, etc.
Pi Guy said...
But ah well--I probably don't even have enough money to buy one of those!
Things like this are in craigslist, in the FREE section quite often. There are 14 listed right now in the Seattle area!
Rich H
Well, I found "free computer stuff," but I didn't find any printers. Guess I can check that out and see what "stuff" is, eh? BTW, thanks for telling me about that, I didn't realize craigslist had a free section.
Try FreeCycle (www.freecycle.org, click on Browse Groups on the top of the screen, select your state, or click Other countries, just under United States, and drill down to your local area. You need to have a Yahoo account, but that is free. Sign up for the individual emails (the daily compilation will be too late for most of the good things. Make sure that you set up a rule to automatically put your FreeCycle mail into a folder - I live in Pittsburgh (pop 275,000) and the Pittsburgh area FreeCycle gets about 100-200 mails each day.
FreeCycle is a mailing group where members offer things that they do not want anymore. I get mail about everything imaginable: furniture, toys, clothing, automobile parts, electronics, etc.
You can always let people around you know you are looking for old electronics. I got an old powerwheels car that way for free--it's only problem were dead batteries. I used one of the motors on my robot Black and Blue for steering and plan to use the other for the paintball turret.
As well as old printers, scanners, floppy drives, video recorders, kids toys, etc. Old carpet sweepers and vacuum cleaners can be a great source of interesting robot cases, wheels and fun stuff like brushes. You can often find them in Op Shops, garage sales, friends and relatives (aunts and grand mothers will usually have one hidden in a cupboard somewhere).
Here is an example of one I hacked a long time ago, it took a long time to eventually get it running, it evolved from PICs to a BS2E eventually. The plan was to take it to a BS2P40 (hence the bigger socket). It·used unipolar stepper motors out of old 360K floppy disk drives for drive motors. The wheels are the paper platten wheels out of a HP deskjet 500 (nice grippy rubber). The main brush and side brush·motors were from kids toys.·Unfortunately the·stepper motors were a bad choice, just too·slow. I eventually lost interest after it killed the second BS2E (both probably from static - who would have guessed that a lot of spinning brushes against plastic would create static charge! ;-) Then a couple year later Roombas became available here, a friend bought one and brought·it over to show. As they did the job infinitely better then I bought one!.·I've since stollen some of the chips, ultasonics and batteries for other projects.
I guess as this was made from recycled bits then should we call it "franken sweeper"?
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It's all a function of time.
SLUG-1 said...
I thought it would be fun for us to get a list of things we scrapped
and got valuable robot materials from so that we can save more money
to buy sensors and and wheels and stuff from parallax [noparse];)[/noparse]
( this would be more useful for a non kit robot builder)
so aslong as its allright with the mods here List away!
feel free to add pictures, I used a scanner light as a way to type at night for a while
ill start with old VCR's ive got tons of stepper motors from them and
some useful gears and Metal plates and such for chassis implementation.
also 1 digital IR reciever - yay -
In a book that I am currently writing, I mention scrounging, and have even found a pretty good page dedicated to just that subject:
Art's New Book said...
You pay for convenience; Radio Shack does not have the lowest prices, but there are Radio Shack stores in nearly every community in the U.S., and many communities overseas. These prices can be considerably lower if you use some of your own parts and make some compromises. For example: by finding a boom-box (with a few LEDs, a speaker, a volume switch and a couple of pushbutton switches) and a parallel printer cable in the trash or your junk box; you connect the programming cable directly to the breadboard rather than through the modular jack (not as portable) and live without the optional component packs, you can cut nearly $40 off of the lower Grand Total price, leaving you with a total cost of just over $20.00. If you have a well-stocked junk drawer, you can cut the prices all the way down to, possibly, nothing.
Many of these items can also be scrounged from junk. If you do not have a junk drawer (or box), RUN out to the street on your next garbage collection day and look for any electronics devices you can find. Pick up a radio, a VCR, a DVD, a computer, a printer or fax machine and any other junk electronics you come across. Take a look at the Scrounging page over at μC-Hobby (www.uchobby.com/index.php/scrounging) for more help on obtaining free electronic parts. Whatever you are unable to find through scrounging, you will be able to find at Radio Shack, Fry’s or most other electronics stores.
Drill down through the links to get to the meat of the subject. Dave has done a pretty good job of documenting this art.
I scapped a couple of old computer cd drives. I used the tray open close motor and gearsets as drive wheels for a robot. I used the sheet metal case as the body of the robot. Its very simular in size to a boebot body.
I attached the motor and gears to the inside, drilled a hole thru the side of the case and epoxied a piece of plastic tubing to the last gear hub and pinned a wheel to the other end of the tubing.
If your going to do this try and find two identical cd drives though otherwise it takes a little work to get the pwm circuits to match speed and load.
I also used the rack and pinion drive and motor that positions the laser head as a drive to pull back a catapult arm and fire a ping pong ball. It works so-so. I think I need to increase the weight of the arm. I can't increase the spring to much more because the drive I used had a little spring released overload. I could try disabling the overload too. I never mounted it to the robot but I had planned on painting a clown face on the cd tray, using the circle in the center where the cd sits as the mouth and have the robot "Spit" ping pong balls out the mouth.
I also used the tray travel switch (2 direction rotary) as a whisker sensor. This works great, only one switch with two output·pins and one power pin.·I mounted a "T" shaped wire on the switch arm and can sensor collisions either right or left by checking the switch.
tedbeau said...
I scapped a couple of old computer cd drives. I used the tray open close motor and gearsets as drive wheels for a robot. I used the sheet metal case as the body of the robot. Its very simular in size to a boebot body.
I attached the motor and gears to the inside, drilled a hole thru the side of the case and epoxied a piece of plastic tubing to the last gear hub and pinned a wheel to the other end of the tubing.
If your going to do this try and find two identical cd drives though otherwise it takes a little work to get the pwm circuits to match speed and load.
I also used the rack and pinion drive and motor that positions the laser head as a drive to pull back a catapult arm and fire a ping pong ball. It works so-so. I think I need to increase the weight of the arm. I can't increase the spring to much more because the drive I used had a little spring released overload. I could try disabling the overload too. I never mounted it to the robot but I had planned on painting a clown face on the cd tray, using the circle in the center where the cd sits as the mouth and have the robot "Spit" ping pong balls out the mouth.
I also used the tray travel switch (2 direction rotary) as a whisker sensor. This works great, only one switch with two output pins and one power pin. I mounted a "T" shaped wire on the switch arm and can sensor collisions either right or left by checking the switch.
This looks pretty cool, I have a few old CD drives (mostly from notebooks, but should be able to get something). I'll have a try at those Saturday.
Art
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Art G. Granzeier III
President, Granzeier Consulting
I forgot to mention the computer cd drives have these really nice ball bearing linear slides that move the laser head back and forth. These are great for linear motion, very precise, and low friction. For their size they can carry a pretty decent load.
I was thinking of using two or four to make a walker if you mounted two at 90 degrees to each other you would have a nice x-y powered slide. Not a lot of travel, but very precise, after all they are made to position a read write laser head. The thing I find odd is they use a standard dc motor, not a stepper. I would have expected a servo. Anyone know why they don't use a stepper?
I buy electronics at garage sales for the sole purpose of scrapping them for parts. I also use Craigs list to get free items to scrap. Laser printers have awesome steeper motors, gears,etc. An old laser disc for the laserbut by far the best yet has been an old 80's style plotter. I got two 12 v motors with controllers, a few stepper motors, various aluminum rods for axles and the entire casing is 1/8 and 1/4 inch aluminum for making vases for bots. Can also cut various other parts.
Comments
Love the Driver's Front View! Neat idea. I have one of these motors - maybe I'll give this a try.
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Whit+
"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." - Walt Disney
traveling and moving. Plastic parts such as tableware, jars, lids,
inserts, insulators, caps, containers, liners, straws, plastic sheets,
headers, cords, thread, rope, packaging, office supplies, clips,
clothes hooks, hangers, cardboard, sprayers, small discarded
items, old toys, pens, wire, forms, tape, rubber bands, elastic,
fabric and leather pieces, springs, coils, magnets, plugs, auto
parts, old clocks and radios, tvs, vcrs, tubes, etc.
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humanoido
*Stamp SEED Supercomputer *Basic Stamp Supercomputer *TriCore Stamp Supercomputer
*Minuscule Stamp Supercomputer *Three Dimensional Computer *Penguin with 12 Brains
*Penguin Tech *StampOne News! *Penguin Robot Society *Ultimate List Prop Languages
*BASIC Stamp Supercomputing Book *Toddler Humanoid Robot Project
*Prop SC Computer - coming soon! *Prop IB Hypercomputer - under development
*Robotic Space Program - waiting for warmer weather
Try FreeCycle (www.freecycle.org, click on Browse Groups on the top of the screen, select your state, or click Other countries, just under United States, and drill down to your local area. You need to have a Yahoo account, but that is free. Sign up for the individual emails (the daily compilation will be too late for most of the good things. Make sure that you set up a rule to automatically put your FreeCycle mail into a folder - I live in Pittsburgh (pop 275,000) and the Pittsburgh area FreeCycle gets about 100-200 mails each day.
FreeCycle is a mailing group where members offer things that they do not want anymore. I get mail about everything imaginable: furniture, toys, clothing, automobile parts, electronics, etc.
Art
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
90 * 2 = Pi
Here is an example of one I hacked a long time ago, it took a long time to eventually get it running, it evolved from PICs to a BS2E eventually. The plan was to take it to a BS2P40 (hence the bigger socket). It·used unipolar stepper motors out of old 360K floppy disk drives for drive motors. The wheels are the paper platten wheels out of a HP deskjet 500 (nice grippy rubber). The main brush and side brush·motors were from kids toys.·Unfortunately the·stepper motors were a bad choice, just too·slow. I eventually lost interest after it killed the second BS2E (both probably from static - who would have guessed that a lot of spinning brushes against plastic would create static charge! ;-) Then a couple year later Roombas became available here, a friend bought one and brought·it over to show. As they did the job infinitely better then I bought one!.·I've since stollen some of the chips, ultasonics and batteries for other projects.
I guess as this was made from recycled bits then should we call it "franken sweeper"?
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
It's all a function of time.
In a book that I am currently writing, I mention scrounging, and have even found a pretty good page dedicated to just that subject:
Drill down through the links to get to the meat of the subject. Dave has done a pretty good job of documenting this art.
Art
I attached the motor and gears to the inside, drilled a hole thru the side of the case and epoxied a piece of plastic tubing to the last gear hub and pinned a wheel to the other end of the tubing.
If your going to do this try and find two identical cd drives though otherwise it takes a little work to get the pwm circuits to match speed and load.
I also used the rack and pinion drive and motor that positions the laser head as a drive to pull back a catapult arm and fire a ping pong ball. It works so-so. I think I need to increase the weight of the arm. I can't increase the spring to much more because the drive I used had a little spring released overload. I could try disabling the overload too. I never mounted it to the robot but I had planned on painting a clown face on the cd tray, using the circle in the center where the cd sits as the mouth and have the robot "Spit" ping pong balls out the mouth.
I also used the tray travel switch (2 direction rotary) as a whisker sensor. This works great, only one switch with two output·pins and one power pin.·I mounted a "T" shaped wire on the switch arm and can sensor collisions either right or left by checking the switch.
This looks pretty cool, I have a few old CD drives (mostly from notebooks, but should be able to get something). I'll have a try at those Saturday.
Art
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Art G. Granzeier III
President, Granzeier Consulting
Helping to Build a Better Engineer
I was thinking of using two or four to make a walker if you mounted two at 90 degrees to each other you would have a nice x-y powered slide. Not a lot of travel, but very precise, after all they are made to position a read write laser head. The thing I find odd is they use a standard dc motor, not a stepper. I would have expected a servo. Anyone know why they don't use a stepper?