My collection of robots.

What am I working on now? Check out my projects page.

I've wanted to build robots for a long time. I recently found some pictures I had taken of my high school science fair project from 1985, I think. It was a project on various types of wheeled robots. They wanted to make it all scientific and stuff, but I just had fun building the robots. Careful about the picture to the right, it is linked to a *much* bigger version of the same picture.

The robot on the left was a simple two wheeled with a caster robot, based on a surplus motor from a Big-Trak. The robot in the center was based on something I saw in some book- a cool concept, with three (PWM speed controlled) wheels, with smaller wheels mounted on those wheels, you can have the robot move in any direction. The robot on the right was built around a toy tank. I'm still using that frame. The other robots are lost to the ravages of time.

If you look closely, you can see that each of the larger wheels has a smaller, freely rotating wheel. The three wheels are located 120^o around the body. They were each controlled with a simple PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) speed control, with 16 speeds. This was before I learned about nifty concepts like closed loop feeback systems. Hey, I was in 11th grade. There were also simple direction controls so each wheel could go in either direction at a wide range of speeds. It was controlled by a big old building control computer (a FID), loaned to me by my friend Yermo. I made it to the County Science Fair.

Lately my designs are a bit more complex, at least they ought to be, with both a Bachelor's and a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering. What you see to the right is my Garage-Cam. I built a pan-tilt head for it with surplus stepper motors. Note: Don't do as I did, while accurate, stepper motors ripped out of disk drives don't work that well. They don't have have the strength to damp out the oscillations of the large mass of the camera. Most of my effort was spent trying to damp the oscillations electronically, with which I only had marginal success. I'm an Electrical Engineer, not a Mechanical Engineer.

I can remotely control the Quick-Cam and the Pan-Tilt head via a CGI interface. I can point it in various directions and adjust the image from anywhere in the world (with an Internet connection and a web-browser). Here's what the Control Panel looks like. It won't work for you, since it is located over a very slow link, public access would be unworkable.

I have re-done the pan-tilt using a couple of servos instead of stepper motors. It works much, much better, plus it has a simple RS232 serial interface, so it is quite a bit easier to talk to. I should be producing a page on that somewhere in the days, months, or years to come. Check my projects page for further updates.

I'd like to give something back to the community:

POHPIC: My Mid-Range PIC Production Programmer

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This page was last modified 228 weeks ago, on Wed Aug 18 2004.