Small project (continuous rotation servo)

March 19, 2014 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Robots 

For a very long time I’ve been a little bit obsessed with continuously rotating servos and searched quite a bit for them online, but never finding any cheap servos available.

Probably just me being a lousy google user, but anyways, I started looking up some mods the other day and today I finally spent 2 hours to modify some old crappy servos to see how it works and… to my suprise, it actually works, even though I used lousy 5% 1/8W resistors (recommended 0.1%) and having my 1,5 year old kid sitting in my lap while doing most of the modifications.

As always when it comes to adafruit, I highly recommend their tutorial http://learn.adafruit.com/modifying-servos-for-continuous-rotation/overview.

1 hour Raspberry pi camera controller

February 14, 2014 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Linux, Robots 

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Kids really chew into your spare time. I got some time the other day to have some fun with a Raspberry pi, raspicam, Adafruit pwm servo driver, 2 servos, double sided tape, tape and cardboard. In 60 minutes I managed to make the “thing” in the video. OK, some stuff was pre-assembled :-).

Also, I’ve just finished setting the construction up running on Battery power. 2x zippy compact 3300mah 4s (14,4v nominal LiPo) in parallel via a 5v 5A bec powering both the servos and the Raspberry hardware. Running everything including servos for 4 hours , my measurement is that I’ve used less than 10% of the battery capacity.

The servos are currently controlled using up, down, left and right keys and the application is just a modified example from Adafruit. However, it should be very easy to integrate with either the mpu 9150 breakout unit I’ve also installed and make a simple gimbal of sorts.

But first I’m planning to test integrating the code with the opencv haar object recognition stuff I did during the Christmas holidays, for example track clementines.