2010 Time-Space Odyssey

By now we settled into a place of our own with a garage. I even bought a drill. It seemed perfect to start robotics again. Surprisingly, in almost 10 years very little had changed in the world of robotics, especially for the home user. I had discovered some like minded people too on Meet-up and at the London Hackspace. I enjoyed the Meet-up, but the leader had moved out of town and so my support group was gone as fast as it came. One of the guys went to start his own robot hobby company.

The Arduino had taken off as a hobbyist platform, but my problem now was the time to learn and play in this area. I bought a Netduino 2 since I was programming in .Net and was impressed with the debugger integration. The Netduino is great, but there's much more routines available for the Ardunio. One thing about not having a main stream platform is that you have to go a little deeper to understand how to make things work.

2004: The Break up

I was happy with my little robot project in 2003 except for the flimsy construction which would break apart in impact if it didn't detect a wall fast enough. I decided I would rebuild the robot with strength in mind. No loose parts and more metal were the plan. I collected a few parts, but without the tools and living in rented London flats, there was little I could do. I upgraded the OOPIC 2 to an OOPIC-R for better servo and sensor connectors, but that's about all that happened. The parts went into a box and moved with me four times without any progress.

Around this time, the Sony AIBO had come out which was what I was trying to create and I saw that very few people could enjoy my robot project with family and friends based in the USA. My interest in photography was re-kindled which fit well with my travel interest. I do admit that on a few occasions I'd need a distraction while on the road and would think of the next robot design, but little more came of it than looking at the packed up box.

Dandroid 2003 on video

We can now see the navigation system can decide if the robot should reverse out of a situation and re-evaluate or turn to avoid obstacles.

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.