Adafruit customer Dave Frey made this super cool 20 MPH IKEA Poäng Chair with aerospace-inspired control panel and lots of Adafruit supplies.!
I’m spent the past two years building the Office Chairiot Mark II(http://OfficeChairiot.com) and it’s got a lot of Adafruit parts inside. It made a showing at the Southwest Maker Fest Saturday in Mesa, AZ and has more shows coming up. It’s been a fun project and I’m hoping it inspires more makers to build what they dream up.
Let’s start with the chassis: The base of the Office Chairiot Mk II is actually more akin to a battle robot for a couple of reasons: It’s got a heavy-duty wooden frame (soon to be replaced by an all aluminum frame) (stayed tuned to this website for updates) and a swanky aluminum body. It wheels around on pneumatic scooter tires for a smooth ride, even in parking lots and loose gravel. It has very few moving parts because of the differential steering. Motors, chains, sprockets, casters and wheels make it go.
The Chassis Inside
Remember that bit about the battlebots above? In fact, this chassis uses a motor controller used in beefier battlebots: The Dimension Engineering Sabertooth 2×60 motor controller. It’s capable of carrying 1,000 lbs. of cargo and can feed the drive system up to 60 amps per motor channel (and even short bursts of over 100 amps). It has many command modes, but in our case, it’s being used in simple serial mode.
The main brain on the chassis is an Arduino Mega 2560, an 8-bit, 16 MHz (1 MIPS) prototyping board based on the Atmel® ATmega 2560 microcontroller. The Arduino takes commands from any number of different kinds of remote controls over its UART (serial port) and translates a simple protocol of characters and bytes into motor commands, RGB LED and relay control.
The Arduino can also report on a number of on-board sensors, giving the remote control access to helpful data points on such things as motor temperature, power wire temperature, ambient air temperature, wheel RPMs, accelerometers, seat occupancy and GPS data.
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