The smart ant's and flea's

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MarkR
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by MarkR »

It seems that China is unlocked now, Jlcpcb have restarted their assembly service and restocked some of the vital parts for my project. However, it is still going to take a few months really before I'm anywhere near production, I'm waiting on more parts and testing various different combinations of motor driver chips and layouts.

On the plus side, the firmware more-or-less works (on the prototype I have, at least with the transmitters I have, I really need to see if I can test it at an event with loads of radio noise and different TXs).

Also the design is looking promising for a 5-channel module - 3x brushed esc channels + two independent pwm outputs for servos or brushless esc. (NB: this does not use a separate receiver, so there is no real option to add more).
Robots: Betsie - RaspberryPi controlled flipper bot with gyro stablisation - too clever for her own good?
Stacie - tidy flipper; 4wd driven by hair bands
CARBIDE2.0
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by CARBIDE2.0 »

Jus make sure you dont get the Corona virus 😜😂😂
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petec
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by petec »

Folks, please remember this is an global forum and we have readers from most countries, including those affected by the virus.

I appreciate the above comment was intended to be lighthearted, please be sensitive to others.
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CARBIDE2.0
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by CARBIDE2.0 »

Sorry iff I offended anyone I hadn't thot of it that way
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Team RobotMad
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Team RobotMad »

AWS61
great event, thanks to all those involved with organising and running it.
i didn't manage to acheve quite as good a result as in Antfreeze 7 but sill good.

AnomalY - thought it was gonna be a bad day when at the start of the first fight it was having major drive troubles, we later notced this was from a bend in the arena floor that pete kindly fixed. just scraping into the top 16 was a decent result and winning best engineered robot as the cherry on top at the end of the day was nice. I kinda target having very well engineered robots as you can probebly tell.

UnorthodoX - i think is still better than its newer brother AnomalY but didn't prove so this time round, not quite getting into the top 16 but doing well against multiple spinners with only a new flipper being required before the next event.

SmartAnt 5 - this time round my worst performing robot being in the losers bracket nearly all day and not even making the group semi finals stage. Just need to get my nanoESC v1 sorted then i will biuld it a replacment.
Lincoln Barnes
Maker of "SmartAnts", and other autonomous projects.
Electronic enginering student at Nottingham Trent University.
PM to order the RM NanoESC
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Team RobotMad
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Team RobotMad »

the RobotMad NanoESC V1
is almost done!
They have finaly arived from china.We are now working on a programing and test bed of pins.
The code is mostly done as it uses almost exactly the same cpu as our older board.
Still need to write some documentation on how to use it and what to solder where as the text on the board is tiny.
here is some pictures of them still in the pannel. At about 14x12 mm its pretty hard to take nice pictures of something so small :lol:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/52PbqGpuvghiX2XR9

after we have them programed and working they will be for sale on our website. delivery mechanisum and price still to be determined.
Lincoln Barnes
Maker of "SmartAnts", and other autonomous projects.
Electronic enginering student at Nottingham Trent University.
PM to order the RM NanoESC
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MarkR
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by MarkR »

Congratulations. Good job!

Did you write any spec / doc? Is that the board with the chunky SMPS for 5v?

If you have trouble taking photos, try putting it on a flatbed scanner, I did that at some point (note: scanners have a very short depth of field)
Robots: Betsie - RaspberryPi controlled flipper bot with gyro stablisation - too clever for her own good?
Stacie - tidy flipper; 4wd driven by hair bands
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Team RobotMad
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Team RobotMad »

full spec and documentation will be on the website when it is written.
befor they are up for sale in a couple of weeks hopefully.
sale will be of 15, 20 are made, 5 are for myself.
more will be made if they are popular.
price will be between £25 and £35 depending on what people think is a fair price?

so what do people think is a good price for a ESC? that is smaller than any i have seen (12 X 14.5 X 2.5 mm).
can do 2 N20 motors per channel (2 channels)
control 4 servos or external ESC's
talk to any single wire output reciver,
battery voltage monitor
did i mention its tiny
does not inculde: reciver, motors, wires, or battery.
would a full kit inculding those parts be intresting?

this is custom made not mass produced so i can not go lower than £25
Lincoln Barnes
Maker of "SmartAnts", and other autonomous projects.
Electronic enginering student at Nottingham Trent University.
PM to order the RM NanoESC
MySolderIsOlder
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by MySolderIsOlder »

Excellent work Lincoln. Looking forward to trying one of these with the little OrangeRx R614XN (which is a similar size).
My standard set-up using a pair of digital servo boards is probably about the same in terms of PCB area but the need to splice multiple leads to get Vcc & Gnd to both boards plus Rx (and weapon servo) always makes the end result a bit bulkier than I'd ideally like. Having a single controller board and cPPM connection to the Rx should make a big difference to that.

Let us know when the shop opens for business - might use one for the next iteration of Recycler!
Stuart (Tony's dad)
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Team RobotMad
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Team RobotMad »

due to well, 2020, RM nanoESC has not been finished until now.
we are in the testing phase and need input on difrent configs people would use.

basicaly i'm asking what people want in turms of the in-built channel mixing and difrent servo functions.
my current thinking is people tend to use all right stick driving. then have the rest of the channles mapped to the servo outputs.

other options inculude: fast refresh-rate servos, what we call flipper function (press of a button causes a servo channel to instatly be set to a pre set position), airming switch for spinners.
any other things people can think of?

we are trying to come up with a calibration sequence, so the maximum travel of your transmiter can be set to the maximum speeds.

currently we are using the OrangeRX R614XN with its cPPM output but have code to work with DSM2 and DSMX sattalite recivers that use Sbus and deltang recivers. if someone wants to use a difrent kind of reciver, if they lent us a reciver and corisponding transmiter we can do the code and give the stuff back.

hopfully we can put them up for sale 'soon' probably in time before any events that we might get to do in 2021.
we currenly have 20 (minus 5 for my own robots) but can get more made if the demarnd is there. price is probably £25.
Lincoln Barnes
Maker of "SmartAnts", and other autonomous projects.
Electronic enginering student at Nottingham Trent University.
PM to order the RM NanoESC
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