Dandroid 2003: Muffin Box

By now I had moved out of the ARobot base with Stamp CPU and into the Cybot chassis with an OOPIC. The OOPIC was a huge step forward in being able to be object oriented and event driven. The Cybot chassis also made stacking levels easier and it could turn in place by moving one wheel forward with another in reverse at the same time.

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Below we can see the Dandroid next to a stock Real Robots Cybot.

Cybot chassis

The ARobot bases steered like a remote control car which required a turning radius. In our small kitchen, there was not much it could do and it got snagged too easily in the small living room as well. A kids magazine called Real Robots had a project where every month you'd get a part to build a robot called a Cybot. The initial base was exactly what I was after and it was dirt cheap too. I bought a few copies of the first three issues to get a chassis, 2 gear motors with wheels and a motor controller which could be hacked.

Dandroid 2002 on video

For some reason the head stopped moving correctly, but you get the idea. The robot is not remote controlled and navigates as best it can (which was not great), in the confined space.

Dandroid 2002: Junkbot

The robot now had enough sensors and some blinking lights from a toy I found being thrown away to give it some personality. To avoid motor increasing sensor interference, there was now two power supplies, one for drive motors, the others for CPU and sensors.

Dandroid 2002: The Water Tower

This new ARobot base design allowed for more sensors. The plastic bottle to raise a digital compass away from the motor magnets below.

Dandroid 2002: Cookie Box Exoskeleton

Living in a tiny flat and without any tools, I'd look for suitable materials to make a robot body. It was a bonus if you had to eat two boxes of cookies as part of the job! There is sonar system mounted above the ARobot board here. While I thought it looked great, mounting more sensors going to be difficult with the internal wiring and no means to build an internal support structure.

The ARobot Chassis

I somehow stumbled upon (or perhaps I searched for days on-line) a robot chassis to build upon. The idea of Lego was always around, but despite how great Lego bricks are there is one serious problem: your robot looks like Lego! For this reason, I try to avoid wood and stick with metal and plastic for robot parts. The ARobot kit included a programmable BASIC Stamp chip, a metal platform and a geared motor plus a simple, but clever whisker system to detect when this metal plate was about to smash into a wall.