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dyrodium
Experienced Roboteer
Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 6476
Location: Sydney
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DT robotics, major design project
Well, as anyone who has recently gone through, or is about to or doing, in design technology yr 12 you are required to do a major design project, a project completley of your own choice... and a tonne of documentation
Anyway, I start yr 12 term four and so start my design project then, but i want to get a nice head start on it, so i'm doing a fair amount of research to see if my idea will work, but i'm not prepared to give it out *yet* as it's so insanely different if it works it'll be awsome... yes it is a robot Probably not a combat robot though!
A few questions;
SOLENOIDS:
Where can you get big, powerful solenoids? I'm searching the net, but so far the best solonoid's i've ever seen have come from an ancient U-matic video player I picked up, awsome chunks of engineering those things! However for the project i'll need about 20 preferably new ones.
Also, when you activate a solenoid, the electromagnetic field pulls the ferrous rod IN to the solonoid. I need a force that moves OUTWARD when the current is applied... I was thinking of possibly positioning the solenoid facing in, and on the other end fitting a non ferrous end, so that the IN force is then used as an OUT force... would that be possible?
Hmm, looks like I may even need to custom make my own solenoids, would that be too hard? (there is a fair amount of budget going into this, I wanna do real well in DT )
CONTROL:
What kind of sensor picks up a rotation on all three dimensions? I was thinking a 3D gyro or possibly two/three rotation sensors (like in the snoil device), and again where can I source them.
Another aspect needed will be the completly custom control system, decoding the recievers PWM into the movement of the solenoids, which chip should form the base of this module? I've heard that picaxes might not be up for the job, but I don't know of any other chips that would be suitable. I'm assuming as only a full on or full off control is needed the system should be reasonably simple compared to a PWM motor control.
PROGRAMING:
I've also noticed that the picaxe code seems to be in an unstructured format (true?), would that make the likely complex code be insanely hard to debug and all together work out?
A few other notes:
>I plan to use the spectrum 6ch for control.
>I'm aiming for a fairly small finished robot, so I may use a small NIMH battery pack or a lipoly battery.
Thanks in advance, this will be a huge undertaking I can do it though! (I hope )
EDIT: it's solEnoid lol _________________ ( •_•)
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YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
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Fri May 05, 2006 12:02 pm |
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