Optimus Prime

Sweet! The blue servos are a perfect max for Prime... and you inspired my son to start building his own transformer robots. He's assembling various parts and pieces from old toys in a little project box now...

Thanks! That's so awesome to hear that your son was inspired, I hope he has a ton of fun building transformer robots. It's always been a dream of mine to build transformer type robots and being involved with the EZ-B project has inspired me to start doing it!

I hope to have a youtube vid of Optimus up soon.

By the way, thanks for all the posts of your Omnibot, I've been following your progression and it looks like you are having a ton of fun building him (with help from your son and Mr. Bubbles of course). The more posts I see on these forums the more I'm driven to build more bots, thanks again for contributing!

Sweet! We're having lots of fun and we're looking forward to an Optimus video...

Well I'm sorry this post will be short, I have much to share but little time to do it in.

Let's just say I'm pleased with the results thus far, and to further tease you guys here's my Flickr Stream to show you a few additions I've made to Optimus recently.

Oh and I had to the classic EZ-B in car shots as well. Optimus is much smaller than an Omnibot that's for sure, he may even be the smallest EZ-B project to date. Although DJ's Spider might give it a run for it's money.

And to keep you on edge the next post(s) will include the following:

-Cheap sound module working with ARC via SOMO-14D -Long distance transmission/control via Synapse Wireless RF100 RF engines -Shuffling a top heavy bot with ARC -Xbox 360 wireless controller setup and range (and surprising find) -Finally some footage

Good luck with your bots people, keep the robot goodness coming.

Alright Optimus is nearing completion so I thought I'd share some media. The hardware additions to Optimus are as follows:

Sound Module: SOMO-14D coupled with salavaged toy speaker, reset switch, and 1GB microSD card Backpack: SB Protoshield and Adapter Wireless Link (replaces Bluetooth): Synapse Wireless RF100PC6 RF Engines Servos: HXT900 X 6 Joystick: Wireless Xbox 360 Controller (with Mods) attached to a USB receiver Battery: 7.4V 900mAh Lipo

It was an interesting find (that I unfortunately couldn't take advantage of due to running WinXP) that you can hook up a Xbox 360 headset to your controller and have a wireless mic and speaker hooked up to ARC!!! This means you can use voice recognition while approx 75 feet away from your laptop/PC and also get feedback from your robot/ARC with speech synthesis to your headphone speaker. Your bot can wisper sweet nothings in your ear while you push buttons.....lol. Another interesting find was that you can indeed get Speech synthesis to work in WinXP by following the tips found here. Unfortunately still haven't had luck with speech recognition in XP, anyone else have any success?

Anyway, here's the evidence of progress:

Original Packaging

Testing SOMO-14D Sound Module

Testing Synapse RF100 RF Engine Transparent Serial Link (9600 baud)

Front View

Side View

Back View

Under the Shield

Rock Fist

One of these bots is not like the other

Let's Roll Out!

Video Footage of testing the Wireless Link at Solarbotics headquarters:

That really cool, I like to learn step by step on how you put the Synapse RF100PC6 Module with Integrated 'F' Antenna together with the ez-b controller and xbox 360 controller. I watched the video and was wondering what boards did you use to connect to the Synapse RF100PC6 Module to?

Thanks

Hi GotRobbed,

Sorry I wasn't able to get back to you right away, i wanted to make a little tutorial for you but I've had a crazy busy week. I might try to get something whipped up this weekend.

As for boards I used:

-SB Protoshield -SB Synapse-Xbee adapter

I ended up using the protoshield combined with the EZ-B female-to-female adapters and the Syanspe-Xbee adapter to mount my synapse module as the protoshield has an xbee breakout. Another reason i used that many boards was that I wanted to mount my sound module at the same time.

I would recommend using this new product instead as it's a cheaper breakout board for synapse modules and you'll just need to find a way to mount it.