25th April 2003

Now work began on the insides of the robot. I bought some Naro HP servos and a Futaba R114F receiver. My batteries, though ordered had arrived discharged, and without the charger that I also ordered, so while I waited for a charger I used a huge 4.5v battery.

The second two pictures show a polycarbonate chassis which was developed to mount the servos on to with my NiMh 4.8v batteries and the received taped on. The rest of the body is provided by Lego.

The Lego wheels were lovely, if only they didn't weigh so much. This robot could drive all over the house. Later, more refined designs, could only move on a smooth surface. I had great fun with this all-terrain robot.

The receiver was a 4-channel model. My transmitter, a Futaba Skysport 6 has two joysticks. The right hand one controls channel one on the vertical axis and channel 2 on the horizontal axis. I discovered that by plugging the left wheel into channel one and the right wheel into channel two I had intuitive steering: NE for forward, SW for backward, NW for spin left, SE for spin right. I just had to turn the remote 45 degrees to the left and it seemed quite logical.

The servos are only designed to move approximately 120 degrees. In order to modify them to move 360 degrees I followed instruction like these.