Robot Challenge 006

Not as productive as I hoped this weekend. I managed to complete the cable harness of the motors and blue leds (which was rather boring but important for the project) and tried out a new look (as I’m moving away from the use of reel cans as my chassis).

Here is the cable harness, before the insulation tape got applied:cable_harness.

The advantage of this harness is that all the motor cables are neatly hidden away and only 4 cables appear on the top surface (one for each motor), plus one for the blue LEDs and the ground cable.

Regarding the new look – I got a few patterns printed on photographic paper and converted them to the side motor panels with a bit of cutting and scoring:
cat_style_corners

Here is how Arkadian-AV1 looks like at the moment (this is still a temporary look):

latest_arkadian-AV1

The image shows an old Freeduino I have for testing. The final robot will be using an Arduino Mega for controlling the motors, reading the sensors and lighting the lights, but all the “thinking” will be done by the Raspberry Pi. rpi_ardmega

Here is a little video, where each motor goes forward for a sec, backwards for a sec, then all the leds are turned on and then the same sequence is repeated on another motor.

Robot Challenge 006 from Arkadian.Eu on Vimeo.