hi all,

For the last couple of months I have been building a copy of James Burton Sonic robot (2 wheel balancing robot),

It has been great to build, using lots of tools, and fun working in my shop.  I made some changes to his design, I use more alum. parts and ready made wheels.  Power tool batteries that are easy to charge and might even be cheaper. The brushless DC motors run on two Odrive motor controllers with a host of settings. The controller is a Teensy 3.6 processor that you program using the Arduino IDE.

My first "rolls" and "falls" with more to come   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so3hPzTDSrI

kwatters

3 years 12 months ago

Wow, so cool. I've also been following James. His designs are inspiring. The force feedback based control I think is pretty fundamental. I'm happy to see you were able to reproduce the sonic bot. Very cool! When do we see Azul mounted ontop :)

Keep up the great work.

P.s. I'd love to hear more about your CNC, experience with it, thoughts, commentary...

harland

3 years 12 months ago

thanks Kev.   I value Azul so probably not real soon on  mounting it. I don't have good control (jerky movement) of Rainbow.  Wish we lived closer, I would bring it over.  I think the PID loop could be better and I have tried a lot of numbers with out making it better. The CNC is nice because it is faster than 3D printing and stronger. But requires more setup, also I enjoy the CAD part of it. It is a lot more expensive to get into.

GroG

3 years 12 months ago

Awesome harland !
Was the original inspiration Boston Dynamics "Handle" ?
(Probably my favorite bot mobility)  Yay for bots on motorized skates !

I didn't think I could make anything like Handle, but did think I could reproduce Burton's Sonic. Sonic is neat and Handle is on believable!   If I could get better control, I think you could add an arm/foot to the upper part. The balance is very strong. Burton designed this with very strong motors.  For MRL there is a lot of motor cotrollers that I have used and all program differently.  You should take a look at the ODrive controller, it has so many values to set and programs in Python. Using DC motors with encoders or DC bushless motors (even better) with encoders is a lot more presice than servors. When I did my marble video with Azul it was hit or miss to pick up a marble.  So I just used a magnet and swept over the top of the steel marble. Rainbow has 8192 cpr's on its motors.

harland

3 years 10 months ago

The teensy processor has an sd card slot, so I added data logging to help me keep tract of what is going on when I issure commands. I keep making small changes to the firmware trying to get better control.

https://youtu.be/HNfGVG0bowU

as always, I really enjoy building stuff in my shop

harland

 

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