Arduino robot adventures (1)
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I have started - for practical reasons of course - to play with an
Arduino-based 3D-printed robot. I decided to use the SMARS [1], It is
not "free hardware" but it's freely available for personal use and it
is rather simple to print and assemble.
I have had a few Arduino [2] parts at home (the Arduino Uno an some
add-ons) and the rest was quite inexpensive and easy to obtain.
The reason why I have wanted to get this thing was a need to inspect
some hard to access places in our cottage and to rescue things from
those places. A robot with camera would be useful here.
I have got then Prusa [3] Mini printer earlier this year and finally
make it work in summer. The Prusa is a local business so it was an
obvious option.
The SMARS is small enough to be printable on this machine. It needed
some 10 or so hours (the chassis, some small parts, tracks and wheels).
For the begining I decided to made a Bluetooth-controlled machine (I
have had to use an Android device to control it - it is going to be
replaced by a dedicated Andruino-based controller). I have installed an
ESP32-based camera on the device.
Surprisingly, all of that worked. I spent a lot of time when figuring
how to power the ESP32 thing (it is fully independent on the main
Arduino-based control system, I even have had to use a dedicated power
source for it).
In practice I have to use 2 devices to control a single robot: an
Android tablet for control application and Wifi-enabled device for see
the camera image from the ESP32. This cannot be done with a single
device as the remote control app does not support divided screen mode.
Obviously, there is a room for improvements.
The machine have been used: it has been inspecting otherwise
inaccessible places for lost items, controls mouse traps and so on.
There are some issues - the original tracks are not ideal (I am going
to print different ones) and it can travel less than 10 m on a 9V
battery (I of course use rechargeable ones). To replace the battery the
machine must be disassembled so I have printed a modified case with the
doors in the bottom. Now I am testing a second one - it is planned to
use this machine to actually rescue things found by the camera-enabled
one.
The software side is slightly tricky - I have had some issues with the
Arduino IDE shipped with my ppc64le Fedora (it seems that it's too
old). So I use the MNT reform with the current Debian on the ARM for
the Arduino IDE. The OpenSCAD (used for deign of customised additions)
and the Prusa Slicer are OK in the Fedora so I'm able to use them on my
fastest machine (the Raptor Engineering Blackbird).
A lot of fun with so tiny device!
References:
[1]
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2662828
[2]
https://arduino.cc
[3]
https://prusa3d.com