DIY Navigation Robot

Seeing that this is the 100th post on BW Science labs I thought that merited a really cool post. BW Science Labs now has a mascot named Vivus the GoBot.

Vivus the GoBot has been under development for a long time. I chose to use the picaxe axe023 microcontroller board because it was low cost and small. The geared motors I used were very frustrating to assemble as it was made of lots of tiny pieces with little instruction on assembly. However, they had a good gear ratio and were very low cost considering the alternatives (pricing $15 for one little motor should be a crime!). I would have liked to use different bumper switches, but the Omerons were the only ones I could buy and were cheap, they actually ended up working really well. I used a 6v power supply which was heavy, but also great because I ended up not needing to solder in a voltage regulator. I would have liked to add two more wheels, but refrained from doing so because of the cost ($4.95 for 2 wheels?!). I used two tongue depressors as a chassis as they ended up being nearly the perfect size. I tried to accomplish this project without soldering because I don't have good ventilation and my respirator broke. However, this paid off big time as I would easily reconfigure wires in 1/3 of the time it would have taken me if I had soldered the joints.

Anyone who has ever attempted to build a robot from scratch know the challenges it presents, often time resulting in failure if one tiny thing goes wrong like using a different transistor than you should or accidently giving your bot one volt too many (Both of these mistakes I have made during other attempts). This is by far my best robot, and its nice to know that its possible after failing so many times.

By far the hardest part was coding Vivus. The picaxe microcontroller runs on BASIC code, which was created in the late 60's. I spent at least 4 hours testing tons of code bit by bit to get it to finally work.

And of course, every cool robot needs its own cool movie.



Or watch Vivus the GoBot DIY Robot directly on YouTube.