Riving The Firebug Rover. via Flesh and Machines
This rover was our robot in the competition of Magyarok a Marson 2011 (Hungarian on Mars). The competition was similar to a capture the flag game, with four rovers on the field at the same time.
We weren’t that experienced that time (and our budge was low) so the project failed. We were good in the first round but unfortunately at the second round some smoke has been made and the motorcontroller went to the robo-heaven. Also we smoked an 25A car fuse, yeah something was very bad in our design. We didn’t have the automatic control in time so we used the manual version. In this case we had to use 15 sec delay between two command to follow the rules. We started the blog roughly after two months to the competition. Here is a picture of the rover at that time.
After some talk we took action, and used Bence’s motor controller. It’s double channel so we can control 2 different motors completely but we plugged each side (a pair of motors) to each control so this way we can use four motors instead of just two.
The motors are 24V. The motorcontroller is from ebay you can check one of it’s successors on the link below:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/High-Current-Stepper-Dual-DC-Motor-Driver-Module-PWM-Signal-Control-Board-/320967349902?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4abb25168e
The BeagleBone was above all: wifi support, motor control, web interface.
The hardware consists of a lipo battery (5400 mah, 14,8v, serves a lot better than the 11.1V version), voltage stabilizator, motor controller, BeagleBone, wifi stick, usb hub, webcam.
Each Tuesday is BeagleBone Black Day here Adafruit! What is the BeagleBone? The BeagleBones are a line of affordable single-board Linux computers (SBCs) created by Texas Instruments. New to the Bone? Grab one of our Adafruit BeagleBone Black Starter Packs and check out our extensive resources available on the Adafruit Learning System including a guide to setting up the Adafruit BeagleBone IO Python Library. We have a number of Bone accessories including add-on shields (called “capes”) and USB devices to help you do even more with your SBC. Need a nice display to go along with your Bone? Check out our fine selection of HDMI displays, we’ve tested all of them with the Beagle Bone Black!