Robotic SUSE Mascot – Part 1. Introduction

In our Hackweek at SUSE we have time to develop our most crazy ideas and projects. My brother and me thought that it could be interesting to create a robotic SUSE pet. The presentation of our proposal was:

The idea is to create a fantastic robotic SUSE mascot using cheap materials. It shall be controlled with you remote control of your TV. After building the prototype the schemes and Arduino code will be delivered for everyone to try building it at home.

We thought of several movements:

  1. Tail movements, cause it has to be nice
  2. Head movement to be more realistic
  3. And the most difficult part, making it walk

Materials

We selected materials that are cheap and easy to obtain. These are ours:

  • Suse Mascot. We used a bigger one in the end, since many things have to fit inside.

  • An Arduino micro. The Arduino is the brain of the robot. The Arduino Micro is a better option than the Arduino UNO since it’s smaller and it has the same specs.

  • Some micro-servos. The servos are the core of the movements. There are three sizes (nano, micro and normal).  We used micro because they are cheap, strong enough and don’t take too much space.

  • A battery. We tried with some 1 cell lipo (1s) of 3.7v but It wasn’t enough to  move all the servos at the same time with out a reset of the microprocessor.  We tried with 9v battery with the UBec which wasn’t enough either. Finally we chose a 2S lipo (7,4v) with a charger that costed around 11 EUR

  • A voltage regulator (UBEC). The Arduino and the servos work with 5 volts. If you use batteries with higher voltage than 5 volts, you need to reduce it to not overpower the electronics. There are different solutions. We normally use a 7805 to the circuits but a UBEC is cheaper and supports more intensity (Amperage)

  • Tons of electric cable. We used individual wires of a UTP (internet) cable.  Everyone has an old UTP cable at home.

  • IR receptor. This small receptor allows Arduino to receive instructions from an any kind of  remote control via infrared.

 

Continues in Part2. Design & Skeleton

 

 

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