Introducing The Altair Ez:2 Robot

I so want one ! Id definitely pay the high cost for shipping to get one here. I look forward to seeing it in the market next year!

Rich, its quite common to have encoders of this resolution, here is the spec for the motor/encoder that I use you will see the "Encoder Pulses per Revolution = 63500" at the bottom

www.zagrosrobotics.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=639

@Josh, here is the encoder datasheet

www.zagrosrobotics.com/files/heds55xx.pdf

@Herr Ball, yes the slave pics are very useful all the V4 has to do is send a command to the locomotion PIC such as "go to the Dining room" and then the job gets done with the PIC reporting back to the V4 when it gets to the target location. The (very sensitive) lower ultrasonic sense array seen below is also connected to the locomotion PIC so if an obstacle is found in one of the route paths then the V4 gets flagged to make a decision of what to do next.

Tony

@Tony, This is amazing to me. I hope some day to be able to use your drive system in my full size B9. I can see him now moveing from Pinball machine to Pinball machine in my game room reaching out and wanting to play and makeing snide comments. I still say you should offer this as a kit that can be assembled at home and sold in parts. It would be simper and more afffordable to sell and ship world wide. A person could buy it in different sections over a peroid of time and others that just want to put your arms and drive sections on their robots could do so. Heck, I'd get a whole bot and a few extra parts.

@All, I'm useing these encoders in my B9 for the hips and waist. I also plan to get one installed in the radar section sometime soon. They are amazing and so simple to use and ind install. I bought the motor with the encoder attached Tony points to (Mine was the faster geared version) and a stand alone encoder. I mounted the stand alone one to a shaft of a DC motor and it works great. I was amazed how smooth and exact it makes my motor in combo with the Kangaroo X2. I had to get used to the large numbers returned by the Kangaroo from encoder for position poisition and speed. Position was from 0 to 32000 between my limit switches and 0 to 22000 for speed. They come in indexed type for super high accuracy and unindexed types if you just need to get within a fraction. You dont have to be too critical with centering on the motor with the unindexed type (that's the one I bought).

Hope I'm not taking away from @Tony's excelent topic but you guys seem interesetd. Here's a couple pics of the motor I have installed and the stand alone encoder:

Hey tony, I noticed some "button" type sensors around the bottom from. By any chance are those ultrasonic sensors like on a cadillac? If they are where are the from and did you have to make a custom ping generator / receiver circuit for them? If they are distance sensors that is a very cool yet subtle touch.

Thanks for the specs link by the way.

What an amazingly visually stunning robot, I am relatively new to robotics and like many of you am waiting for my v4 to awaken my robot "TRAKX". You guys are such an inspiration to me and each time I come on the forum I learn so much.

Thanks guys

Josh, you are right these 4 round items are ultrasonic transducers from a very low cost Car reverse parking system.

Unbelievably for under £10 you can get a complete 4 transducer (4 sense zones) system (they even supply the hole saw)! Here is one on ebay but there are many

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/4-Parking-Sensors-LED-Display-Car-Reverse-Backup-Radar-System-Sound-Remind-BL-UK-/141243942520?pt=UK_In_Car_Technology&hash=item20e2cb8678

The system is so good that it can detect and give the distance of a vertical piece of 20mm plastic conduit in any of 4 zones (very accurately) to a distance of up to 1.6m (the earlier photo in this thread shows this).

How it works is like this, the whole package is for a retrofit car reversing system, each of the 4 sensors are two way (send and receive) and they are connected to a small control box. From the control box there is a serial connection to an LED display and buzzer that fits on the cars dash. This serial link is bit-bang, so I needed to reverse engineer it and produce a PIC to decode it. This dedicated PIC can make decisions about the readings like emergency stop, display the reading results (as you see in the photo) and also communicate with the locomotion PIC and V4 via a serial or I2C link.

If there is enough interest, I will do another thread on the hack

Tony

Yes Tony, that would be awesome!... I am going to pick one of those backup warning systems off of eBay... Maybe I can adapt your PIC code for the transducers to use with the Arduino (which I am getting quite proficient at using now)... Then interface with the EZB....

Tony Thats a yes from me too please re reversing radar interface to I2C link

added one recently to my robot but need to interface it to EZB

Thanks in advance Pat