Tips on Parts Salvaging:

If you find yourself with some computers or electronics that you are going to toss out here are some tips for salvaging parts:

1. I like to keep on hand a couple of spare hard drives, floppy drives, CD-roms and CD/DVD burners but I don't save them all. If you tinker with computers keep a few on hand.  The rest you could sell on ebay rather than toss.

2. I almost always save computer memory and CPUs, even if they are very old.  They are small and you can throw them in drawer somewhere.  There does not appear to be a great demand for these, but one never knows.  

3. Jumpers, keep all that you can. Those little jumpers on old mother boards or video card, even hard drives come in handy if you lose one or need to create custom jumper settings on your own homebrew projects.

4. Screws. Keep the screws from the drive mounts and back pannel, those come in handy if you ever loose one.   Get a small divided container to store your little screws, you can never have too many.

5. Stand offs.  These little metal or nylon standoffs help support PCBs and most computers don't have them, but if you find them during your electronics tear down, keep them all.  You never know when you might want some and those little suckers are price.

6. Wired connectors. I love to cut out wired connectors of any kind. The small ones that go to the mother board from the front pannel are handy for smaller electronics and the power supply connectors come in hand for larger voltage load connections like DC motors. You can easily and quickly splice in these connectors to your own projects.

7. Switches.  If you can easily save switches those are handy to keep as well.  If I have to spend more than 2 minutes getting a switch out, for me, it's not worth it. 

8. Speakers.  I love saving old computer speakers, they are so easy to add to microcontrollers or robots to give audio feedback or make random R2D2 type beeps. 

There are tons of other parts you could keep, motors and LEDs come to mind; but those are ones I personally do not save often. 

Happy Roboting,
-Justin

Well, looks like I have not been keeping up with my blog, bad me! First things first, I finished reading the book I got at Christmas, titled: Growing Up With Lucy, by Steve Grand, copyright 2003. Its a robotics/AI book. I love this book even though its not what I expected. I was hoping the book would more of a step-by-step, Young Frankenstein esc "How I Did It".

The book was actually more of a journal through the development of the Lucy robot as a platform for research. Steve Grand is a self educatated and self driven researcher. His writing is humorious and witty without being Fozzy Bear comedy silly and makes the theories and basic models for AI/Brain theory easy to understand. His book was very enjoyable to ready and is now one of my top favorite books. In other news, I've been re-focused on learning database design, Access databases and Power Shell scripting at work for United Health Care. Not only am I able to automate many of Security Admin tasks with Power Shell but I'm also able to leverage what Access offers in way of easy database query and reporting functions. I used to think Access was garbage, but its actually rather robust and I think it can actually offer something to the robotics community. I'm also taking what I have learned and applying it to the creation of a Hobbiest Parts Database in Access. I think it will turn out rather useful to anyone wanting to manage their parts, tools, electronics, even scrapbooking items. Once finished I plan to make it a free download. I think hobbiests will find it handy. In family news on 3/2/12 my parents home/farm in Menifee county, Kentuck was struck by an EF3 tornado. The damage was extensive but both my parents are ok. I've learned alot from seeing what a tornado can do and what types of items people need after a tornado. Sometime in the future I plan to make apost just about my experience with seeing peoples needs after a tornado and offer some advise and tips on how folks can volunteer to help after a tornado if so inclined Until my next post, Happy Roboting and may God bless you.

Valentines Day 2012

I love it that my wife supports my robotics tinkering and research. Check out my Robot Scientist card!! I'm in robot/nerd heaven! lol

Seriously though, I loved the card and share it. I hope everyone reading has a spouse or mate that is as supportive as mine.

Robot Building for Beginners, Second Edition by David Cook

Robot Building for Beginners, Second Edition by David Cook

Review: I read this book on Books24x7.com on, which is a great service. You can read tons of books online for a membership fee. Books are of a business, IT, programming and technical nature. They have a good selection of robotics books too.

This book is not bad for a beginner who wants to build a nice line following robot on their own and really learn about the parts and tools involved in the process. This books does a nice job of covering the subject of making a very basic robot and introduces someone to robot building through the line following robot. This book does not cover any other types of robots and does not cover more advanaced typics like microcontrollers or computer control. If you desire to build something more than a line following robot I would not recommend this book.

Awesome video on Subsumption based robots

From Robots.net I came across this 2 hour video from David Anderson, a member of the Dallas Personal Robotics Group, with a great discussion and demonstration on some of the uses for subsumption.

You can view the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CXReb7f0Eo&feature=player_embedded#!

What I like is how far David has expertly taken the subsumption design approach to create what I would call high performing robots with a somewhat basic design.

In other words, his robots are not covered in duct tape with wires hanging out all over like mine, hehe

Pretty neat to see and educational. =)
Happy Roboting,
-Justin Ratliff

Cookie Monster

It only took forever, but I was finally able to update the cookie monster project at RobotBox.net. For some reason the site decided to frown upon my text entries and photo uploads.

This little robot I plan to use to desktop experiments and as a portable robot for education use and show and tell events. He was cheap to make. Quick to make. Easy to carry places and cute!! :-)

Servo POWER!

Powering more then 2-3 servos on a robot can became a rather large pain in the side. I've never addressed the concern for powering several servos at once before with out either burning out a voltage regulator or just using batteries in the proper range for the servos.

With my new robot David, a small humanoid, about the size of a toddler, I needed to power 6 servos from a 12 source. David's power is going to be a 12volt SLA rechargeable battery, but for now is is powered by a plug in Ac-DC source. Originally I designed a power system with a 12 volt regulator (7812) to provide power to a (7805) 5 volt regulator for logic circuits and a (7806) 6 volt regulator for the servo power. I soon found my design was flawed in several ways as all of my regulators were getting hot and in certain circumstance they would go into thermal shutdown and stop working.

I really wanted to create a power system that was simple, cheap and would provide all of David's power needs from a single power source. His power needs include Basic Stamp IIe, a mini Serial Servo Controller II board, (6) standard servos, a laser tag gun, several sensors for motion and object detection, (2) 12V dc drive motors and PWM control boards for the DC motors. When Davids motors are running, the amperage demands can really add up.

Through discussions on the TRCY.org Yahoo Messageboards, several members contributed ideas to my issues which lead me to discover a few things.

1.) I needed to get rid of the 7812 12volt regulator, as it was rated for 1 amp, it was doing none of the other systems any good.

2.) I was mistakenly powering the mini Serial Servo Controller II board from the 7805 5volt source. The documentation states the logic power needs to be 7-15 volts as the board has it's own regulator.

3.) I had no heatsink or supporting filtering caps on the 7805, I added a heatsink and a 10uf cap on the input side of the 7805 regulator.

4.) The 7806 was doing me no good as the servos did not need that much power. I replaced the 7806 with an interesting setup for dual 7805 regulators wired in parallel, with heatsinks and 2 filtering 220uf caps and a filtering 100nf cap.

5.) The 12volt dc motors and PWM control boards get their power from 12 volt power source, not through a 7812 regulator like I was trying to use.

6.) Large diodes like the 1N4001 can help drop the input voltage down going into 7805 regulators by as much as a volt for each diode used. When you consider ever volt over what the regulator requires is often wasted as heat, diodes can come in very handy.

This method so far is working well for me. I did find it hard to find good reference sources for powering more than 2-3 servos from anything other than directly from a battery source rated for the needs of the servos. So I wanted to share what I learned from my experience.

Heatsinks are a MUST! Caps help a lot! Discussing your designs problems in a group like TRCY is a wonderful resource!

As an added note, a couple of good suggestions that the discussion in the TRCY group offered were to use a premade 1.5 amp regulator board: http://www.wrighthobbies.net/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=28&products_id=146, as suggested by Eddy Wright of http://www.wrighthobbies.net

And another interesting idea I might try in the future is to use an individual 7805 regulator for each servo. This prevents an overdraw of current and will help reduce heat. My dual setup works for, but considering how cheap 7805 regulators can be when purchased in bulk, it's an interesting design idea submitted by "David" AKA robots42

Another product I came across that looks promising is a 10w Adjustable Switching Regulator designed to fit in the space a of 78xx series regulator: http://www.robotshop.com/dimension-engineering-de-swadj-1.html

P.S. I want to thank HVLabs for posting their circuit design online, which is where I got the idea for my modified dual 7805 regulator setup. See the original circuit here: http://www.hvlabs.com/serservo.html