Fascinating. Like many people, this stuff intrigues me.

I mean no disrespect with the following question and I truly know much less about this subject then you. However, presuming there are intelligent paranormal entities that are detectable and able to be communicated with, I would think one would try to make the tool they are using to do this as normal, quite and smooth as possible. Following this (maybe flawed) logic, I see two issues; One: the tread motors are very loud and annoying. Two: the weird (but cool) voice the robot speaks in when it detects something. Do you think these two things would put off or even scare away the entity? Perhaps I'm looking at it wrong. Maybe these things would attract a curious entity like a hungry fish to a lure?

I'm interested in your thoughts as you seem knowledgeable about the "other side". eek

Yes correct,the motors are a bit noisy and that is why I had to learn how to add the stop/wait/pause commands in the scripting so it can ask the paranormal questions. And wait 10 seconds for any reply on the Voice recording uploaded to my Laptop,then I needed to learn the goto and return commands so I could jump to different parts of the scripting. This way the robot could continue roaming with video camera as long as I let it go doing it's own movement routines. I am mainly doing this as a fun summer project as I get invited to many group investigations of famous haunted places, We just did the Old Cornwall jail near Ottawa last weekend and I did hear a screaming woman on my headphones from the women's jail cell.That was a mind trip! I do think that paranormal beings,whatever they are,can be very curious of our electronic devices. This is why I added interesting sound effects to the robot and same time asking them serious questions.We will see,hopefully catch some voices, They have called out my name at several locations but only heard later reviewing the sound recordings.

Omg they have called out your name? That would have been crazy to hear that afterwards.

I don't think spirits would be bothered by sound, it could maybe be the opposite we will never know.

But the robot is quite loud, is there a way for the robot to say center itself roughly in any given room, and then scan the entire room but having the head/upper torso being able to spin 360? Maybe the gears need a good greasing.

Would be interesting to see what other cameras could be used to maybe possibly highlight spirits by showing then in another spectrum of light? Not even sure if that would be possible, would be awesome if cameras like that were available.

As far as using the original Rad robot base motors, It was just for economical reasons rather than buying newer more quiet motors but now that I have demonstrated that this robot can work as an investigation camera/audio microphone autonomous roving and EVP "ghost chasing" robot. I will end up buying one of the newer Tank chassis robots from China made from stronger light weight Aluminum and stronger more quiet motors. to design a more serious bot for outdoor and indoor investigating. I will always keep this Rad-bot for testing new scripting at home though, I think I have grown attached to the little guy,LOL! Also NewageTomy, what a great suggestion you came up with to have the robot enter a room and just spin his head 360 degree movements to scan with several types of camera and microphone(parabolic) keeping it way more quiet and still capturing evidence! Love it and in fact going to order a servo for the neck tomorrow! /thanks! I am looking at buying the thermal cam adapter for my Android phone to see cold spots & warm spots in a given room or outside and yes the full spectrum cam is on my to do list.

Hehe your very welcome, im happy i gave you a great idea. : )

Full Spectrum!

Right on Bro always looking for suggestions to make improvements!

I want to see a GhostBuster's style, light emitting...full spectrum light cannon.

For now, a Fancy Laser Grid to light up an entire hallway or room could be done to detect any objects or shadow people trying to cross the beams....Also some new servo arms holding a blue light saber could be wild! Just bought 2 new batteries, testing out now and significant boost in motor speed and hopefully longer running time! A 5000 mah 7.4 Lipo battery for EZB and a 3000 mah Nimh for h-bridge and motors. Also got a great deal for a universal computer Lipo battery balancer/charger that will do all types of batteries.

Maybe some laser diodes?

Bounce them off some mirrors?

Oh ya, those green burning lasers from China,can pop dark balloons!

Haha yeah i've seen that, funny how they can only pop black balloons and no other color. Good for engraving things though.

But you can create laser light displays with them i think, and use them for robot navigation, etc.

This is a good link about how to use lasers for robots, interesting read. Get some reflective diffraction grating, shoot a laser through that and see what happens.

Uses for Lasers in Robotics: http://www.servomagazine.com/uploads/issue_downloads/808/Robotic-Resources.pdf

updated the Battery and lighting systems as it was not good enough before for wandering around outside at night. now with the 7.4 Lipo 5000mah and 2 nimh 8.4 for the motors and lights, this little guy can show everything on it's video camera ,in pitch black night! I had it roaming around the campground almost the whole night at the end there!

Looks awesome at night, loved the on board footage, she travels over the ground really well! : )

Oh nice work with the batteries, whats your run time roughly now?

I am still experimenting with which battery to use for the EZB and the H-bridge motor controller because the H-bridge needs more juice for the motors but then also the EZB is running it's own Wifi server and video feed from the cell camera along with all the other data transmitting to my Laptop.It seems that using the 7.4 5000mah Lipo battery has never died on me yet hooked to EZB and the motors will die first on the H-bridge Nimh 8.4 volt 3000mah battery. (should buy another Lipo probably) The EZB with LIPO is superior to the Nimh.I will try switching the batteries to see what happens but the problem comes with Lipo will no longer have the early warning battery status from the EZB if it is on the motor controller.The robot was still running after 5 hours and if the motors did not completely slow to a crawl,The EZB seems to run forever so far LOL! No low power warning ever came yet! I am using the Venom brand Lipo with the new all in one balancer charger,can also recharge the Nimhs and Nickels. One further note is that I don't drive the wheels at full throttle I will often run at quarter speed and stop/pause for many minutes while listening for sounds and observing video,so this helps to keep juice in the motors.

Would continuous servo's be a good idea to drive the wheels instead of running them from a H-Bridge?

But wow your run time sounds really good, but yeah the ezb is very good with power consumption i've read. : )

Venom are good, i use their lipo low voltage alarms.

Wow great idea again! I should try newer servos as those can connect directly to EZ B right? Then I could use the H bridge for other control motors in the head and arms, dart gun!

Exactly!

I want to build a track vehicle, really looking forward to it.

But everything will be inside a shell, hd camera on a 3-axis gimbal so the footage is always smooth as butter across even the bumpiest terrain, 100% water proof, cctv camera, night vision, etc.

You notice all the other terrain recon bots have everything mounted up high, so if anything were to happen, equipment is going to get damaged, but when you look at the military grade recon vehicles, everything is inside most of them, their like a brick. : )

Yes I am going to buy one from China these awesome tracked Aluminum Tank base kits for proffesional robots,designed heavy duty for outside terrain. I was glad to learn everything on my cheaper Rad-bot and I will take all this experience to the more pro robot in the future.

Thats really big, what are you planning on loading onto that?

Those springs look a little dodgy, you would need to upgrade that before you get it going, is there any video footage of it?

Ya the photo is mis leading,not as big as you think, more like 2 of my Rad bases put together in size but all metal and better motors all around for higher torque to climb anything.I think I did see one video on YouTube once, there are a bunch of different sizes available if you check Ebay.

All good, as long as there's video of it working then that's great. : )

Hey man, just came across this one...let's revitalize it for a cool Halloween event?

Ah ha ha ya that was afun project i had using the old rad robot. I still have it using the paranormal scripts but the psychic ladies in my paranormal group were frightened by the voices the robot would do investigating a haunted room,LoL!

LOL. Psychic ladies being frightened by a real robot using a recorded voice. However they are OK with sprites, demons and disembodied voices. That's a scream.

Ah ha ha! Ya Dave but you gotta understand these ladies think they are picking up psychic messages in there head so they would not know what to do if they ever hear a real noise in some of the more creepy places, like they would turn and run if they ever hear knocking sounds or just a cat scuttling about.LOL! I don't buy into the psychic stuff but am interested in anything my instruments really do detect and I have some really amazing voices that answered questions on my recording tablet. I do got to say that one time I kept thinking about the old cartoon Sylvester and Tweety bird and that phrase " I tot I taw a putty tat" Kept going in my mind and then later on the Owner of the house said they sometimes see the spirit of an old woman her nick name was Tweety. That completely blew my mind,LOL! One time at another place we had not yet started investigating at this 150 year old restaurant.We were just eating and chatting, I just kept seeing this lady in Pink dress at the other table just staring at us for like an hour after I went to get my cameras and came back the Lady in pink was gone but nobody except me ever saw her,she looked completely real to me so that left me scratching my head. Not sure if this stuff is real or not but it is fun to use new tech to find evidence. The XBox Kinect camera I have is something I want to try because they say if you catch a stick figure in the middle of a room with no chairs or tables near it ,you can ask it to raise it's arms or walk left...if it does that can be real evidence of something invisible following your questions...I will let you know the outcome when I try this out if it's true.

Cool, sounds like fun. Some believe, others don't and I'm not sure myself. However I've got an open mind and like to have fun with it. Either way it's very interesting.

Yeah man, keep it up!! It is good to give robotics another flavour at times!! When they are inventing algorithms that are a black box which is sealed for even those that created it, why wouldn't you have a device that is taping on another unknown source?

Also adds a little dystopian taste to it...

Did you hear about that robot priest in Kyoto, talking about robots that make connecions to deitys and ghosts!!

LOL! That's not a Priest, It's a Terminator in disguise! They can't fool me ! Ha ha!