This is a tutorial for creating the botduino, a web-controlled robot which uses an arduino board.
Stuff you’ll need:
- Double sided foam tape: Great quality, strong as houses double stick tape for sticking components on the chassis. [maplin link]
- Lego: use lego to build the chassis, its strong and very easy to use. [Plastic containers are great too]
- Bluetooth Arduino + Stripboard + L239 H-Bridge chips x2 + 16 pin sockets x2
- Motor with gearbox x2 (gearbox is important if you want yourrobot to move) + 1mm Single Core wire + Soldering Iron + Solder + 9v Batteries + 9v bat housing + AA Batteries + AA bat housing (2xAA = 3v, 3xAA = 4.5v both enough to power arduino BT) + helping hands
- Web hosting with PHP support – you dont NEED this, you can use my controller and it will work with your robot.
Solder some stuff together. (wear body armor whilst soldering)
So now you’re gonna create the motor controller, I used this tutorial to create the botduino controller. The L239 chips are designed to control two motors but as I couldn’t get two working with a single chip, I used two chips to control one motor each.
This is what my boarduino controller looks like -
The 9v is going into the controller and is the power source for the motors. Arduino BT can only be powered by a maximum of 5.5v so I used 2 AA batteries to power it separately – but I recommend you use 3 AA batteries as they will undoubtedly last longer.
This tutorial will help you with an arduino and motor controller
So now you shoul have the batteries, motor controller, motors and arduino BT mounted on your chassis. Use the double stick tape to hold things down, but make sure you get it right first time, as that tape is a pain to remove. I used lego motors as well as lego wheels, so they fitted together perfectly;
but your wheels may not fit tightly on your motor so use some hot glue to tighten things up a bit.
Remember to share ground! Here’s a silly little schematic for you:
