Friday, August 19, 2011

Initial electronic and electrical parts list

Very quickly I came up with a list of the electronic and electrical parts I would require for the first version of my robot, SHORT-E. I bought the parts from a couple of sources: an Ebay seller in Hong Kong and Robot Shop. This is what I got:

An Arduino starter kit from Ebay (31€ inc. p&p):
  • Arduino Duemilanove w/ ATMega 328
  • breadboard
  • 1602 LCD module
  • USB cable, some jumper wires, potentiometers, LEDs, buttons, resistors, etc.
Other stuff from Robot Shop EU:
  • Devantech SRF05 ultrasonic range finder (sonar)
  • Dagu mini pan&tilt kit w/ two mini servos (for pointing the sonar in different directions)
  • Lynxmotion multi-purpose sensor housing MPSH-01
  • a battery holder for 4 AA batteries (4*1.5V=6V, for powering the servos)
  • a 9V battery jack with an Arduino-compatible plug (for powering the Arduino, obviously)
  • some break-away headers for soldering into the sonar module
I already had:
  • two GWS S03N servos modified for continuous rotation (to be used as drive motors)
I suspect my "Arduino" Duemilanove is not a genuine Arduino. The price was suspiciously cheap and there seem to be some cosmetic differences compared to images of genuine ones. While the design is open source and anyone is allowed to make and sell Arduino-compatible boards, they shouldn't be using the name Arduino. Oh well, the Chinese aren't too strict about these things.

I was planning to add other parts later. With only the parts listed above I would have to resort to open loop motor control, which would probably cause SHORT-E not to be able to drive completely straight, and to slow down if going uphill, etc. So already when I ordered my first batch of parts I knew that I would at least have to get some components for making rotary encoders later.

2 comments: