Robothon Success!

Our GM2 gearmotors are powerful, and just a bit slower than a standard servo, making them ideal for a walker. But for you folks who like wheeled robots, these are simply too slow. Solarbotics' own Grant McKee to the rescue! We barely had the motors opened 10 minutes before Grant figured out that these motors […]

David Cook wrote a book. That book is a technically a Cook book, but we won't call it that. We'll call it Intermediate Robot Building (no, we don't have it yet, we're still waiting for our order!), and it heavily features the Roundabout Robot. If you're familiar with Mr. Cook's first book Robot Building for […]

Unlike Sparkfun, who actually manage to find fake Atmel ICs, we just get strange batches. The Atmel ATMega328 is the power behind the Arduino/Freeduino/*duino, and we have to set up a programming system to burn the venerable Arduino Bootloader into these chips. We normally use an AVR STK500 in HVSP (high voltage serial programming) mode, […]

The University of of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been running a BEAM-style mechatronics program (GE100) for the last few years. The purpose of the class is to build a self-powered device that can propel itself over both smooth and rough terrain, using a pair of servos and a BEAM-style servo-controller circuit (similar in function to […]