A very popular robot form factor these days is the self balancing robot. And the best example is the Segway personal transport with two horizontally mounted wheels.
But has anyone done a robot with two vertically mounted wheels, like a bicycle, that can stay upright? We went to find out.
It turns out that, YES, there are some cool robots with inline wheels! In the Youtube video above, Youtuber aoki2001 shows a great example. The large wheel where the rider would be is what makes sure the vehicle doesn’t topple over. It acts as an inverted pendulum, pushing against the large wheel’s inertia by rotating the motor to which it is attached.
But why use two wheels when you only need one? His unicycle version is below:
Consider building your next robotics project with Adafruit Crickit – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express that lets you #MakeRobotFriend using CircuitPython, MakeCode, or Arduino, to build robotics, arts, crafts, audio animatronics, sensors, agriculture/robot farming, physical computing, kinetic sculptures, science experiments, telescope control and much more!
Do you have a self balanced unicycle or bicycle? Post your experience and build in the comments!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Biohacking — Vitamin-C + Gelatin for Accelerated Recovery
Python for Microcontrollers — MP3 decoding, CircuitPython snakes its way to Fomu, NXP, and more! #Python #Adafruit #CircuitPython #PythonHardware @circuitpython @micropython @ThePSF @Adafruit
