ArduRoller

This repo contains the source code and assets for my ArduRoller balance bot.

Here's a video of it in action: http://flic.kr/p/a4iTvU

Specs:

• Chassis: laser cut 2.7mm bamboo ply (Ponoko); various M2.5 machine screws from Amazon; Instamorph low-melt-point thermoplastic to fill in the gaps.
• Brains: 1 x Arduino Uno
• Motor driver: 1 x Sparkfun Ardumoto
• Motors: Sparkfun 2 x 24:1 gearmotor
• Wheels: 1 set Sparkfun 70mm -- repaired with Instamorph after they cracked around the axle
• Gyro: 1 x ADXRS613 (Sparkfun breakout) mounted at the axis of rotation
• Accelerometer: 1 x ADXL203CE (Sparkfun breakout) mounted at the axis of rotation
• Batteries: 2 x 3.7V Li-poly 850MAh (Sparkfun)

Code

The code is in main.c. The code only depends on avr-libc and it includes the proect files for the AVR plugin for Eclipse.

The code has 3 parts:

• main() is the entry point, which runs
• setup() which does start-of-day initialization.
• ISR(TIMER1_OVF_vect) the interrupt service routine for the timer 1 interrupt. The ISR is the main workhorse function. It runs several hundred times per second.

There are a lot of magic values in the code that took me considerable time to tune. I also find that some of them aren't constant (e.g. the gyro drift changes with temperature and battery voltage). If you try to make one of these it'd probably be a good idea to pick my brains before you start or to use a more standard approach like a complementary filter.

Assets

The diagram for the chassis is in the assets directory. I used Ponoko to manufacture it in (2.7mm blonde bamboo).

ArduRoller Chassis by Shaun Crampton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

WARNING It's prototype standard -- I had to rebuild the motor mounts with Instamorph because they were too loose in one direction and sand them heavily because they were too tight in the other.