K-9 has a plywood chassis based on the BBC’s schematics of the K-9 robot from Doctor Who. Learn more!
An h-bridge controlled geared motor system provides K-9 with mobility. An embedded Raspberry Pi manages the entire system.
K-9 uses espeak, a free utility for text-to-voice, to explain the math problems he solves, and to say some funny things too. It took a little experimenting to get his voice sounding similar to the voice of the K-9 character in the Doctor Who Sci-Fi series.
import os
os.system('espeak "Daleks are attacking, run for your life." -s 120 -p 0 -v female3')
os.system('espeak "My favorite color is Tardis blue." -s 120 -p 0 -v female3')
K-9 uses a home made CNC machine made from two floppy drives and a CD drive to write out the solutions to the math problems he solves. The machine is controlled by three easyDriver stepper motor drivers and an Arduino Uno running Grbl, an open source, embedded, high performance G-code parser and CNC milling controller. This tutorial describes how to use an easyDriver and an Arduino Uno to control a single stepper motor.
The i.fluf was the first component of K-9 that I built. The purpose of the K-9 project was to build a computer-based robot from scratch, so that I could learn everything it takes to succesfully design and create an intelligent robot. With this goal, I started the project by designing and building a unique nibble-sized central processing unit from digital primitives in DIP IC packages. Since K-9 was a learning exercise, which I hoped to share, the processor was designed to be extremely accessible, so that a person could look at it with the naked eye, be able to tell that it was working, and deduce what it was doing.
Learn more about the processor build in this article.
I set out to build a robot to keep me company. For the chasis, I use OSEPP's mechanical tank robotics kit. On the hardware side, I use a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B, Arduino Uno and Adafuit Motor Control Shield V2. I also need some optical isolators so I use four 4N35's.
Jaeger is the name of the battlebot that my sister and I built for the first ever Great Canadian Bot Brawl which took place during the 2015 Maker Expo at Kitchener City Hall.
We designed Jaeger in AutoCAD and built his chasis using plywood. We programmed an Arduino to understand the PWM signals from a radio remote control receiver and control 3 drill motors through a circuit we designed using 4 SPDT relays. My sister and I were able to talk to a reporter from The Star about our robot and were excited to be mentioned in this article about the competition.
