It's alive!

The very first working modular robot

As I have previously posted, I have now finished the current versions of the Edgebot shield and motor controller board and they're working correctly together. I quickly designed a chassis for the robot that would act as a platform for the electronics to be attached to. The design includes and integrated caster roller that uses a common 40mm ping pong ball as the main pivot, this is inserted with a little force and a reassuring 'pop'. Once this current design can still be improved greatly, for example, the pin-pong is very loose and rattles a fair bit when not in use, etc.

The ping-pong roller ball, still to be finalised, but working.

The main section of the chassis is made up of 2 layers, the first of which is the base, this is what the gear motors are mounted to and the battery mounting rests upon, while the front section of this layer is slightly obstructed by the roller wheel fastenings, it does contain space to put other sensors or parts.

The top layer currently only accommodates the stackable PCBs, the motor controller is fastened to the acrylic using four M3 bolts and some nuts. Then other layers are stacked on top of that to provide other behaviours to the robot, such as light seeking and object avoiding, whilst the motor connections could be attached to the motor controller permanently, the other behaviour modules' inputs are interfaced by right-angle headers pointing outwards from the board. You can then plug in the sensors as they are required.

The files for the chassis design featured in this post  (v0.1) can be downloaded from Dropbox.