This is Haka Public Radio Episode 522 for Tuesday the first top February 2022, today's
show is entitled, set up your robot building lab and build a $0.0 robot platform.
It is posted by Macatrolyac, and is about $0.0 minutes long, and carries an exclusive
flag. The summer is, at one of Robot Warlords of the Apocalypse, build a $0.0 robot platform
slash crash-mark if from old printers.
Hello, and Greetings. This is Macatrolyac, the mildly malevolent Macatronics
Megalo Maniac, with episode 1 of Robot Warlords of the Apocalypse. We're going to be
setting up your robot building lab and building your first platform crash buggy.
So I hope you do join up this project of bringing to life the dead, the EOL, the discarded
electronics products. If you don't join, you might just end up like the subject of an
HR geager painting. Remember, be the assimilator, not the simulated. So let's get started.
Stop here going to want to order to follow the instructions that I'm going to impart
to you. So I'm going to need an Arduino or a kit. I recommend getting a kit with the
sensors. I got the super learning kit by Key Studio, and it contains a ton of stuff that
will really get you up to speed in what sensors are sensors. They return a voltage based
on stimuli, so your Arduino can read that. Also, some return a variable resistor value, but
it's all voltage in the end. So it's really handy, and you'll be able to add sensors and stuff
much more readily to your robot if you understand how they work beforehand. And the kits come
with a perf board, or not a perf board, or what's it called? Bread board. It will contain a bread
board, and other useful stuff like wires to hook everything up with. So do that. You can order
some extra Arduino as well, order some extra Arduino. You can order Arduino nanos as well.
There's slightly smaller, but a little bit less robust. I've gone with Arduino, you know,
from my first build. My second robot build is using a nano, so depends on what you want.
You know, I'll be describing, you know, so it may as well get, you know, if you're just starting.
Go to your welding shop. Locally get some small machine screws of various lengths, like
from like a half inch to two inches. Something like that. Various thicknesses. With nuts and
washers, make sure you get the nuts and washers too, because you're going to be using that to mount
your Arduino and other stuff onto your platform, and to actually put the platform together.
And 18654 cell battery compartment. Yeah, of course you're going to be ordering this online
from either Ali Express or Banggood or Amazon, whatever you use. I use Ali Express. It's the
cheapest. It might take you a week or two, but you know, that weight can be advantageous, because when I
blew up a H bridge module, and I was waiting, I just started building my own and I built my own.
So the 18654 cell battery compartment that will give you a 16 volts, which will run your
H bridges, which will run your motors. So that's pretty important.
Two 18651 cell compartments. I use one for powering the MP3 player, so you might not need two,
but if you get an 18654 charger, a wavegat, plug into a USB via a mini USB power, and you can charge
your 18655s from those. So you combine one of these little wavegat chargers. They're just a
board. They're like, I'm not even one inch by one inch board, and you can hot glue that onto your
one cell charger, and then solder wires to the terminals. Then you have a charging device right there.
If you have one of those USB battery cases, you know, the little things, those hold usually
two 18655s inside those. So you might be able to take one of those apart and just use that as your
charger. So there you go. Very post-apocalyptic ready. As you're going to want a soldering station,
you're going to want to buy some solder or flux, and the solder suckers. Very handy.
If you're going to be removing the soldering stuff from circuit boards, guess what?
Tree sap also works. Yeah, that's what rosin is. So if you've got it, if you are in a post-apocalyptic
scenario, you've got no solder, you can use tree sap, and it'll make the solder flow that's on
your circuit boards, and you can reuse it. Perf board, perf board is simply a nylon
perforated board. It's got a bunch of little holes, so you can put your
leaded electronics components into that. I used it to build my H bridge module out of relays.
It's not really an H bridge, but it reverses the polarity to the motors, so you can make go backwards
and forwards. So if you're not keen, if you're not too keen on soldering, you can just get one of the
L298 NH bridge modules. I used two for more power and one to control the front wheels, one to
control the back wheels, but that's up to you. You can experiment. That's what we're all about.
Extra-duepont wires, good idea. There's an email to mail wires just to hook your stuff up.
You should be able to get a lot of wires out of stuff that you take apart as well, especially
TVs and stuff like that. Save all your wires. Get extra resistors. Yes, you can desotter all the resistors
you need, but it might take a while until you get the component values that you want, and you're
going to want a bunch of that or one K, you're going to want some of the 200 ohms, whatever.
Optionally, ultrasonic sensors and MP3 modules are things that I added to my first
bot, which I call the Harold Interceptor. It's the Harold because it's got an MP3 player on it
with a speaker that I stole from a television set. As I mentioned L298 NH bridge modules,
they'll run you like three or four bucks, so you might as well get two or four of those.
As we'll get four, if you're going to get two to use for your device. Tools and accessories,
as I mentioned, solder station, you're going to need a computer with internet to put your IDE for
the Arduino on Raspberry Pi three works as well. If you're listening to this on a bloodstained
slave slab that you found discarded, yeah, you should have downloaded all the libraries and stuff,
but hopefully you still have internet access. You can go to Arduino.cc, download and install the Arduino
IDE and you're going to need basic tools like screwdriver's pliers, airplane SNPs, which is
you're going to, if you're going to cut metal to reinforce your things, you're going to need airplane
SNPs, they work really well for cutting metal. A drill with assorted bits, you're going to want
like small, pretty small bits, like, I don't know, three millimeters, something like that,
and you're going to want like a three quarter centimeter or one centimeter bit, a hacksaw,
behindie to cut down those metal rods, a ruler, and a multimeter, multimeter, very important for
checking your stuff. To organize your stuff, you're going to want a parts drawer, you can get those
for like 40 bucks at home hardware, and they've got about 30 or 40 plastic drawers, put all your
goodies in there, as well as several rubber-made bins or cardboard boxes for all those circuit boards,
ABS pieces, steel rods, and stuff that you recover from printers, put them in there, get rid of your
wife, if she complains. Okay, so collect and assemble your post-apocalyptic scraps. So safety note,
be careful when disassembling stuff, use pliers rather than your fingers as much as possible,
printers and other products can sometimes be tricky to take apart. There might not be visible screws.
There might just be tabs, but if you try to force the tabs and it's wrong, the ABS is
strong, but it's brittle, so when it breaks, it can be sharp, so just be aware of that.
Laptop batteries definitely be careful with those,
try not to short any circuits, you're cutting these really thin metal strips that are
behind between the cells when you take apart laptop or power tool batteries, and those metal strips
are very, very sharp when you cut them, so be careful, use pliers, metal cutters, and try not to
create any short circuits if you do, they're just going to possibly be an exothermic reaction,
especially if you pierce a battery. I've only done that with one of the flat cells, and it's
started smoking in through it outside. All right, so to get ingredients, printers are one of the best
sources, great source of mechanical and chassis parts, including motors. The best or the ones with
the scanners built in, which means you get an extra stepper motor and you get glass on top,
which you can use to build a solar panel if you have those little cells that you can order from
AliExpress or whatever. Your DC motors, a mid-sized printer, is going to have two that are exactly
the same, so if you have two printers, roughly the same size, usually you'll get exactly like
four of the same size motors, and depending on your printers it might be slightly smaller, larger,
they're about four centimeters from end to end, which is the ones I use. You can use smaller
large ones, you can use two smaller in the back or two larger, you know, in the front or back,
whatever, switch them around, so things you're going to find in a printer that's steel rods,
so the steel rods will have wheels with rubber tires on them, because that's the paper path,
so it moves the paper around, and you can slide those wheels off, and those are going to be
the wheels for our robots. You can also use toys and stuff, but this is pretty convenient when
it's all in one spot, so to that, other stuff you find in a printer gears, specialty steel plates,
reeds switches, rotary encoders, IR switches, lots of ABS parts, so there's a lot of neat ABS
parts, like levers and hinge it neat stuff, the one power supply box I used as the Arduino box,
because it perfectly is the same size as the Arduino Uno, so I use that to protect the Arduino Uno,
like I said, the glass panel can be repurposed as a solar panel, UPS devices, the
uninterruptible power supplies are good for relays and optal isolators, like I said, if you're going
to build your own age bridge, you're going to need some relays and optal isolators, if not,
you can skip that. TVs for lots of wire speakers, more optal isolators, lots of transistors and
other components, especially in older TVs, laptops, power tools, cell phones, you're going to
get your batteries from those, so that's about all I can think of for ingredients right now,
just any post-consumer electronics, take it home, take it apart unless it has a radioactive symbol
on under some, one caveat for printers is there is a ink reservoir in a lot of printers, so be careful
being stained of ink, that's a big hazard being ink stained, so books libgen.is, if you want to
read some electronic books, that's a good one, and there's a free book, that's a
by donation, it's called Designing Electronics, that work, I believe I'll put link in this description
for that as well, all right, so now that we've got our ingredients gathered and we've got a
solder station, all our tools ready, hopefully you have a table to put it all on, and when I was
a kid I used to work on the floor all the time, it gives you a sore back, yeah, so get a table
to put your stuff on, all right, so as a promise we're gonna build a smash buggy, which is basically
your platform, which is going to be a case like a DVD case or a CD player case, the first one I used
was actually a hard drive tray, and it actually had four holes which accommodated the motors
perfectly, because there's a little kind of a hob around the spindle on your DC motors,
and it's about a centimeter or so, so you got to need a larger hole in your chassis to put those,
and well, hopefully you know the convention for attaching wheels, motors, you know, like
two on each side type thing, you're equally spaced, you know, like a car, so do that, so with mine
all I had to do was drill some smaller holes to attach the screws, screw them in, because there are
screws that come with the motor, so when you take the printer apart, make sure you save those screws,
just screw them right back into the motor when you take them apart, okay, so hopefully you
have got your motors all positioned, the spindles around the outside, okay, now this is the most
fraught with difficulty part, which probably could use some innovations as well, but I've succeeded
pretty well, the secret is JB well, basically, but if you pull out your motors, they're going to
usually have a gear on them, always, and sometimes those gears will fit perfectly into the holes
on the wheels that are the size of those steel rods, and you know, it's, count yourself lucky
if you got that, sometimes you might have to remove the gears from the motors spindle, if they're
not perfect, you know, they're not going to fit perfectly into those wheels that you have,
if you have to take the wheels off, make sure to brace one side or hold it, hold the side of the spindle
with pliers or something, because you don't want to pull the spindle right out of the
inners of your motor, and that'll wreck the motor, so yeah, okay, so if you're lucky enough to have
motor with the gears already on it to attach your your printer roller wheels, that's great
because so if you've already got those gears on the motor and they actually fit perfectly into the
holes in those wheels, just add some hot glue and you should be good to go, if like if they're snug,
yeah, the two that I found for my robot were snug, very good, and two were not, so I had to take
those gears off and find a replacement hub, so what I settled on, it's not perfect, but it last
pretty, pretty good, there's still the weak point where the spindle actually attaches, but
it's a lot better, so what I did was took some coax wire, I think it's RG6, or something, so
slightly smaller coaxial wire, you know, for your cable vision, so you cut that into like a
centimeter or whatever is perfect to fit into your hub hole in the wheel, you're going to take out
the copper center conductor because you're going to be pushing that onto your spindle, and you're
going to want to use your JB weld in this case, or a epoxy, if I'm a JB weld works really well,
still infused epoxy, so that's going to be your build for the wheels, so hopefully you got
your wheels all on with minimal struggle, now you're going to be taking your 18-650 cells,
usually two will work for this, so you tape two together, you can use elastic bands to hold on the
wires, so we're going to be attaching the wires, I would suggest soldering wires to the motors,
so you can touch those wires to your battery compartment that you made by taping two cells together,
and test which way the wheels turn, so you're going to want all your wheels to be turning the
same direction, unless you're testing the differential steering, in which case the one
on the right will be going the opposite direction to the ones on the left, making it spin around
like a maniac, so this is just to give you like when you're drawing, you're going to draw the
eyes first to give life to the picture, so this gives life to your robot project, you're going to
know that the motors at least work, so I would, if you want to do this, I mean this isn't
absolutely necessary, but I think it's fun and it'll give you insight into how fast this thing
will be with two cells, I mean I used four, and then I graduated to five, but so there's no
age bridge, there's no controller or anything, we're just testing the mechanics exclusively,
so once you've got your motor turning the way you want, you're going to be tying all the
wires together from, so you take the one side, the one terminal, whatever determines your positive,
that makes them spin one way, and just bind all those wires together, you've got the mall
solder, so it's going to be one wire for each motor, you've got them solder to the motor and then you twist
them at the end where they're going to be connecting to your cells and do the do the same for the
other terminal, so you've got, you're going to have two wires, one connecting to one terminal,
and two sets of four wires, one connecting to each terminal on each respective motor, just check out
please, just check out the video, hopefully this is described well enough, but once you do that
you can kind of flimsly attach it to yourself, put it on top, you've got, now you've got your platform
with wheel spinning madly and just set it on the floor and watch it smash into something, and
when it does crash, it'll just, when it does crash theoretically, the wires will come loose,
and so that's your test, so that kind of, we'll give you something to look forward to,
another pointer on the chassis themselves, like I said, I recommend like a DVD case or CD
case or hard drive tray, I've also used a power tool battery box for my second one, but that's
a little bit more involved, because you have to make standoffs for the motors that, but we won't
talk about that, so if you're building it out of a DVD case, you're probably just going to
use the one side of it, because to put it together, I mean, you got your motors sitting there,
so you're probably not going to be able to fit the top of the DVD case on the way it was,
so if you want to put the top on you, it's going to be like sitting on top, kind of built up
like the latest cars in the latest rotary movie and fury road, and got those cars stacked on each
other, it's going to be sort of like that, but anyway, I hope that gives you starting off point,
and just a point of excitement, you know, whatever you decide to do, it'll at least show you what
it's capable of, if it's not fast enough, add another cell, you know what series is, hopefully,
hopefully you're going to look up what series is, and what parallel is, the cells are in series,
the motors are connected to the cells, and parallel should work out for you. So next time,
I'll be showing how to make sense of it all, so next time I'll be showing how to make your
insane crash buggy be controllable via Arduino and H bridges. So until then, this is
mechatroniac signing off, check me out bitchute.com, mechatroniac, and remember, be the assimilator,
not assimilated.
In Dorsland, non-paid endorsement for key studio, super learning kit for Arduino, and this is like several
years old. It comes with a nice buglet, a nice green clear case with all the components in it,
and a resistor sticker, which is nice. But listen to all the stuff that's in this kit. You get five
each of blue red and yellow LEDs, you get an RGB LED, you get a bunch of 220 ohm resistors, 10k,
resistors, 1k resistors, so those are always handy, I recommend ordering extra resistors,
as well, those are going to lower values, very, very useful, but you can decide
of them off the circuit boards as well. It's just harder to find resistors that are like
a lot of them are the same value and you're going to be one like four of the same value
in the first year. If you are building the 8th bridge yourself, although I didn't want to
worry about it, but it comes with, as well, a potentiometer buzzer, active buzzer, passive buzzer,
four large button switches, two tilt switches, three-folder resistors, one flame sensor,
an LM35 sensor, which I'd use heat, and 74HC, 595, and 16-pin dip, I see, which I think it's
a multiplexer, a 7-segment LED, four module 7-segment LED, an 8x8 LED matrix, 16 0 2 LCD display,
which is not funny, and how those redouts IR receiver and IR remote control. So this really
helps me because I use remote control with my robots IR, so I'm able to use just the TV remote
now server motor, a stepper driver module, stepper motor, a joystick module, relay module, a PIR
motion sensor, an analog gas sensor, a three-axis acceleration module, HCSR-0-4 sensor, which is ultra-sonics,
which I incorporated into the parallel interceptor, clock module, temperature and humidity sensor,
a soil sensor, RFID, RFID, RFID, key, pin headers, 830-hole breadboard, breadboard is really handy,
you can use that to hold your components while you're experimenting with new H bridges,
put it right on your bot, you can use that and not have to actually have a formal circuit board,
and it comes with a different connector wires, which are just hooked everything up with those
and jumper wires. A 6-cell battery pack, you can go this way, this is for double A batteries,
I like the Lithium-18650-cells, but if you do like the 18650-cell 2, well 2, because there are 1.5
both each, and the USB cable, so, and it's got nice description of everything, and the website that you
can go to to download all the code, so you don't have to type everything out like back in the
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