Wheels and Motors are back on!

Tuesday, Feb. 16th, 2016

After a long day at work, I came home somewhat exhausted, but in dire need of some robot work to clear my head a little.

Hero to the rescue!

I had cleaned the motors and mounts some and decided to remount the wheels, and both motors so that I could prepare for the micro-controller that was going to run them.  So here he is with all the wheels re-attached and both motors attached.  Shown here is the drive motor, which is attached through the L-shaped bracket to the steering stepper motor mounted above.

This motor is attached directly to the wheel and drives it through this DC motor attached to a gearbox (the square box it is mounted to).


The steering motor is a stepper motor, also attached to a gearbox (for torque at low speeds).  The shaft coming out of that motor attaches to a collar on the L-bracket you see above and rotates it plus or minus about 90 degrees from center to the right or left.

Steering Motor in place above drive motor and bracket

Since the stepper motor does not move like the drive motor, I am going to shorten the wiring up and attach it to the stepper driver as soon as it arrives and do a little testing.



The code for this project will likely all be in C++ created in Visual Studio along with the Visual Micro add-in for debugging the micro-controller live as the code is running.
For anyone interested in this, Microsoft makes available a free version of Visual Studio (msdn.com) and the Visual Micro debugging tools are free to download from visualmicro.com and test with.  If you want the pro version of the debugging tools for personal use, they are very reasonably priced ($25.00) for a a single license to test with.  I purchased that to use since the pro version as some live debug tools I want to try out.  You can use these tools in most versions of Windows so there is really no downside to trying them.  If you are not a Windows user, you can stick to some of the other Arduino IDE tools for Mac and even one for Linux...see the Arduino.cc site for more details.

The code for the motors will be for an Arduino and so it will be fairly straight forward for me to program, but I will likely create a few of my own drivers for the motor boards so that they can be called on other projects as a library of my own.
I will document and post the code here for all to see as I progress.

Well, I have to be off for the night as I have an early day again tomorrow travelling onsite to work with a customer.  More on this robot as the week progresses.