The 9V motors on the T300 robot vehicle are each fitted with two hall effect sensors that act as encoders. I figured I’d take a closer look. The two sensors are positioned to read a magnet attached to the rear of the motor’s shaft. They are quite close together so that, as the magnet rotates, one will be triggered very… Read more »
The 9V geared motors fitted to the T300 tank, which forms the base vehicle for my Sheldon robot project, come fitted with encoders. I’m not sure I need these, but they might be useful to have. But first I had to do a little simple reverse engineering to work out how to connect them. Each motor has a six-pin connector,… Read more »
A comment over on Reddit made me realise that I haven’t yet mentioned a key characteristic of my Sheldon robot project – inaccuracy. I mean, I could* built a robot with incredible precision that would be able to locate and move itself to tolerances of fractions of a millimetre. Think of those amazing pick-and-place robots that populate circuit boards with hundreds… Read more »
Many beginners’ guides to electronics teach you how to build motor controllers using mosfets, H-bridge circuits and all that good stuff. And maybe I’ll get around to doing that one day. But to get this robot project up and rolling, I decided to go for an off-the-shelf motor controller. I’ve used many before, including Arduino shields from Adafruit and Snootlab…. Read more »
Right from the beginning I knew that the Sheldon robot would have a multi-processor architecture. This appeals to me the same way object-oriented programming appeals – you can create a modular system in which each part does a specific task and can be treated like a black box. The structure will be hierarchical. At the top – what I’m going… Read more »
One of the things that spurred my current interest in electronics was a resurgence of my fascination with robots. And so, here we go with another project – a robot base vehicle that I can use for experimenting with sensors and algorithms. (Technically, this is not a new project – it’s a new start to a years-old project, but anyhoo…)… Read more »
It’s always the same. “I’ll just hack out this quick program,” you think. And you get it to the point where it works and does the job you intended it to do. But then: “Maybe it would be nice if it also did this…” And even when you’ve added all the functionality the program will bear, and your wife is… Read more »
In the last post, I mentioned how I’m using a RetroClinic DataCentre to make it easy to transfer files between the BeebEm emulator on my PC and my real BBC Master 128. A USB memory stick plugged into the DataCentre becomes my main disk drive (*DRIVE 5) for program files. It also holds floppy disk images (single-sided .SSD and double-sided… Read more »
No, this isn’t going to be a tutorial on BBC Basic. Nor am I about to offer programming tips and tricks. This is about being comfortable while hacking. In the last post I wrote about recreating the first serious program I ever wrote on the BBC Micro. And I mentioned that I’d written the code using the BeebEm emulator running on… Read more »
So what was your first program? You know, the first one that meant anything. My guess is that when you unwrapped your first home computer (mine was a Sinclair Spectrum 48K) the lines of code you typed were little more than snippets – changing some colours on the display, perhaps, or making rude words scroll endlessly down the screen. You… Read more »