Giant Metal Detecting Robot Rover

fixmax

Hi all,

I'm working on a project that may be of interest to some folks here. It's a 5ft x 3ft rover, that will be both a metal detecting research platform and a generic microcontroller platform. I will be using one or more Propeller Prototype USB boards, so it will have a ton of Parallax goodies on it. Here is the link. I linked to the 12blocks site posting, since it gives a bit more detail, and the rover links also.

http://forums.hannoware.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=455&sid=cae5d094785bfd99ffda27cb926b05b7

Attached is picture of the bot in progress..

vanmunch

Looks preaty cool, I would love to sit on a beach and have my robot "fetch" gold for me.

What motor controller are you using? Sabertooth 2x60?

fixmax

I'm initially going to use a Pololu 24V23 amplifier for each motor. However, I am watching the open source motor project by Parallax with interest, because I would be more interested in using that when available. As it stands right now, I am using a lot of pre-existing and available designs for the intial build. However, I want to eventually replace most of the proprietary designs with open-source Parallax or other versions. That has the most interest to me in the long term. I just don't have the resources and time to roll my own version of all the pieces I will need up front.

This is one reason why I am all for soliciting help with pieces of the design. Even though I have most of the hardware selected for the intial build, I would like to eventually replace them with community-created/modified versions.