Jon's Place

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

BrainBot - Getting Bigger

So, I've been working full time on BrainBot for six weeks now. Things have changed somewhat - the researcher who wants us to build a bunch of these wanted a Core 2 Duo class onboard cpu, so we had to redesign to allow for a mini-itx. As it happens, we can now put a Core 2 Quad onboard, since the board is the same size...

In order to handle that, we needed to add more batteries, so the chassis has gotten quite a bit wider - we can now fit four 12 volt 4.2 amp-hour NiMh battery packs inside the chassis, two on each side of the motherboard.

We upgraded the chassis panels to be 1/4" Delrin, and the standoffs between them are 49mm long, in aluminum.

The motors are 12 volt 200 RPM gearmotors, with 100-tick encoders, which feed into a pair of LSI LS7366R 32-bit SPI quadrature encoder counter chips.

Its pretty funny when your robot has more onboard processing power than your development laptop...

2 Comments:

  • It's a beast!
    What will it be used for with all that power?!
    How long will it run for on those batteries?

    By Blogger Phil Winder, At March 27, 2009 at 5:18 AM  

  • Most of the power will go to vision processing, and speech recognition.

    I have no idea how long it will run - its going to have 200 watt-hours of capacity, which will hopefully let it run for at least an hour.

    By Blogger Unknown, At March 29, 2009 at 9:11 PM  

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