My dancebot attempt

smbaker

Just thought I'd share some pictures of my first prototype, based on the DanceBot from the Prop Book. I've followed the design pretty close to what the book suggests for parts, the only thing I really needed to substitute was the wheels which are some slightly larger ones from lynxmotion. Rather than using a clear PVC enclosure, I have it mounted to a thick aluminum plate. It's currently prototyped out on a PDB, but I'll probably have a custom board made if the robot turns out to be a keeper.

I'm impressed with the book, the design was pretty easy to build and get operational. Only took me one long evening to do the main assembly, fabricate the base, program it, debug the few problems I encountered, and learn how to use viewport.

It's currently a bit unstable. If I give it a good thunk to know it off balance, I'm not sure it can right itself without blasting full speed across the room. I'm wondering if I increase the wheel mass (perhaps throw some weights in them) then maybe it'll be able to self-correct without as much movement. It also tends to wander around a bit; I'm assuming that may be because I don't have the tilt offset computed correctly yet.

Youtube video is at

Hanno

Congrats! That's awesome. Very impressed that you got yours working so quickly- it took me a long time to get that far with mine.. Have fun experimenting.
Hanno

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Co-author of the official Propeller Guide- available at Amazon
Developer of ViewPort, the premier visual debugger for the Propeller (read the review here, thread here),
12Blocks, the block-based programming environment (thread here)
and PropScope, the multi-function USB oscilloscope/function generator/logic analyzer

smbaker

Thanks. The ease in getting it going was very much due to the code being complete and easy to get up and running and the book having such a good discussion of the hardware. The only places where I really ran into issues were when I changed things up, for example trying to move the encoder to a different set of pins without really understanding how the assembly for the encoder counting worked.