Now I have the EZ-B kit and the Hearoid it's time to start my Showcase thread.
I still haven't decided on a name for him yet, all suggestions are welcome.
I won this robot on ebay weeks ago, for the past 2 weeks he has been waiting for me to collect him...
Today was the day, a road trip to pick him up and bring him back to his new home...
In his new home (with Omnibot and Wall-e in the background totally unaware they are next in line to be opened up)
It wasn't long before this happened...
Now waiting to go in the dishwasher to get nice and clean.
The plan is to make him autonomous, running 24/7 (except for when he knows to go charge himself up) but will also be adding in the various image tracking options.
The only other slight modifications to be made to him are to convert the head to tilt & pan which will involve having to give him a small neck.
The head will include the camera. I haven't yet decided to fit it in one of his eyes or to make it his nose. The issue to overcome with this is the blue tint on the bubble head. The mouth will have a light or some lights in which flicker when he speaks.
The arms will be given some life with servos at the shoulder joints and the elbows provided I can get them to fit in there nicely.
Ultrasonic sensor will be in his chest, probably on a servo to give a wider view.
Original drive wheels and gearbox seem to be in very good shape so will plan to reuse those and just replace the existing motors for the modified servos if they can manage the task.
Speaker and microphone will be in the original positions - if it's not broke why fix it?
Not too big a project but enough to give me a test, help me learn and bring an old robot back to life.
Other robots from Synthiam community
DJ's Voice Recognition Robot
Rb550f's Meet Tk
Well today was fun....
Took time out of building to play around with the battery monitor for the auto charge function. The LiPo battery I am using has a balance plug which is there to give an equal "balanced" charge to all cells of a LiPo battery.
My battery being a 2S LiPo battery has 2 cells wired in series and the balance plug is a 3 pin plug which connects to the + of cell 1, - of cell 1/+ of cell 2 and - of cell 2. I thought it would be ideal to run a cable from it to the ADC ports to read the voltage, what I forgot is ground, being - of cell 2, and cell 1's connection give the voltage of both cells, 8.4v, which is too much for the ADC port.
The LiPo battery is wired like this;
So I now have the first cell wired in for monitoring by tapping off the ground and +v from cell 1. I need to do cell 2 which would be between - and + of cell 2 but the question there is, is it safe to connect the ground from an ADC port to between the two cells?
I also spent some time writing the EZ-Script for monitoring the ADC ports, converting the ADC value back to a voltage value, checking for errors with cells reporting 0v and ADC of 255 (i.e. not connected), and also added in a multiplier for voltage division if required after some discussion here.
I also made the Battery Monitor EZ-Script available on the EZ-Cloud if anyone needs it (or wants to give me any constructive criticism.
Now there is a mass of wiring to be tidied up in the torso. Some photos
After a lot of googling for my LiPo voltage monitor I finally found the solution, although it's not what I wanted but it'll do.
Seems like the only way to read the 2nd cell's voltage (and 3rd, 4th etc. if more cells if anyone else comes across this and uses a 3S1P LiPo) is to use a voltage divider, measure, multiply in EZ-Script, minus cell 1 voltage and you're left with Cell 2.
So, now to build the simple voltage divider circuit;
10k resistors are shown as I have those here, is it worth upping them to 100k? Any other additional safety precautions that could be put in place? These simple dividers are all over the net as the easiest way to do it so I assume they are good to go?
And adjust the script, which wont be hard at all.
Nice
As long as the 10k resistors drop the volatge to below 5 volts and using 1/4 watt you should be good to go. Of course a VOM should confirm the voltage before terminating to the EZ-B.....but try and get confirmation from others
I just jumped in and went for it, it works fine
It's reporting back pretty much the same as the lipo voltage meter I have so it's all good, although the next task is to figure out how to limit the decimal places, currently they are showing in ARC to too many decimal places, I want it to 2, but that's tomorrow's job.
The total the battery can get to is 8.4v (4.2v per cell) so just halving the voltage did the job. When I get chance I might pick up some bigger resistors to reduce the current draw, for now the 2 10ks wil do though.
better idea is to use a divider for each cell and have analog switch using digital output pins like the 4053 series called multiplexer/demultiplexer chip
with your circuit idea where you say minus 1 cell,each cell has a different voltage as it charged or drain in a robot,so it wont give you a good reading of the second cell
Rich! good to hear(oid) about your bold leap working out! I am thinking the issue of "too many decimal places" is task for ....DJ...unless there is way in your script to strip the extra places.
It gives a spot on reading of the second cell, or at least it did for the 20 minutes I spent testing it.
ADC0 reads the voltage of cell 1 ACD1 reads the voltage of cell 1 + cell 2 So ADC1 - ACD0 gives me the voltage of cell 2
What advantages would the multiplexer/demultiplexer chip give over the resistor divider?