Rover Project: Update 2

So the robot parts sat in my closet for a few months. I kind of forgot to order the parts.

Recently realized I really need to disconnect more fully from work in my off hours. When your hobby includes coding and in same language as you write for work.. Its a bit harder to keep your brain from making that jump to thinking about work.

So i’ve been on the look out for new hobbies.

I don’t recall where, but I saw someone making something with a 3D printer. Made me wonder how much they were now days. After some research I realized some where actually extremely affordable. After even more research.. I was able to determine that at least a couple of those affordable printers actually were decent.

The possibilities to prototype things seem endless. Not to mention.. I actually spent the first 2 years of my post highschool schooling at a VoTech school learning CAD. So this is perfect! Those 12+ year old skill can actually be put to use. I say that. But really i’ve identified lots of areas that those skills actually have helped me out in how I approach problems. But still.. To actually to use CAD.

So I bought a 3d printer.

I’ve already printed kids items and been praised as it being a great decision by my kids. Even my wife had me print several things for her baking projects.

The purchase of the 3D printer has me inspired to push forward with the robot project. Being able to draw up in CAD and print the wheels and chassis will help greatly in moving this foward.

Time to pick up where we left off.

When it got shelved we had realized we had the wrong motors and controllers. So first we need to correct that.

We needed a controller. From reading around looks like this is called an H-Bridge.

I found a couple of examples using the L293D seemed like a low cost chip that didn’t need a lot of additional components to work with. Also found this great write up about the chip set:

https://maker.pro/custom/projects/all-you-need-to-know-about-l293d

So picked up a few of those from Amazon.

Now we’ve got to find some DC motors. This might be a point i’ll have to iterate on. But as long as I can power them and they will move I think we will be good. Ordered a pack of DC Motor 1.5V-3V 15000RPM.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JYM8H18/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I’m not 100% positive on these.. But looks like operates between 1.5-6V. Also claims 3 hours running on 2 x 1.5V AA batteries. So with 4 and other components maybe we can get at least 30 minutes?

A couple of articles I found on working with this H-Bridge:

Now to wait on these parts to arrive. Plus some tools needed to build out my electronics work area. Has been pretty barebones since Harvey. Time to fix that :)