I built a Jetbot this weekend.
How do I embed a photo here? (Sorry it is so blurry)
I wanted to show how I cut away the body with a Dremel to accommodate the double-shafted motors with wheel encoders that I got from Sparkfun.
I’m hoping to implement true position and velocity control, eventually.
In the meantime, it is all working great – very cool!
Hi tonyvr,
This is awesome! I love the Dremel work. I couldn’t even tell, it looked like a modified chassis design to me :)
Really looking forward to seeing how your modified JetBot progresses! Are you working out of a particular fork of the GitHub project?
Best,
John
Thanks John,
I initially considered designing a new chassis, but then decided to start with the released design and work from there, to minimize the changes. Printing with the back end as is would be tough, so I was thinking maybe adding a spar along the back side behind the ball (or something).
As far as software goes, I haven’t looked at it yet, beyond running the basic motor control and tele-op examples. Using a Jupyter notebook server is brilliant! I will try to use a github fork to share any code I come up with.
tonyvr
Ah, makes sense!
Thanks! Hope everything goes smoothly, let us know if you run into any issues. Looking forward to seeing more!
John
Hi John,
I thought I’d let you know that I’ve found a problem booting the jetbot if the PiOLED is connected.
If I disconnect it, cycle power, give it enough time to boot, then reconnect the PiOLED, it works fine thereafter. The IP address displays properly after a few seconds.
I monitored the serial port console during boot. When it fails to boot, I don’t see anything out of the serial port, so it is probably a power issue.
The only differences from the ‘stock’ jetbot is that I used the double-ended motors from sparkfun rather than the single-ended ones from adafruit that are specified. I also run the power from the battery into the barrel jack instead of the micro-usb port (jumpered appropriately).
Tony
An update –
I found that if I kept the PiOLED plugged in, but disconnected from the motor board, booting was reliable. I then noticed my i2c lines were very close to the motor driver chip on the feather board, so I tried bending them to keep them away from the feather board. Booting is now 100% reliable with everything connected.
Tonyv
Been using my Jetbot for a few days now. Trying to redo the teleop code to use forward/reverse and yaw instead of each stick controlling one side. I have a hard time driving it that way. Ran into an issue with the usb wifi adapter specified in the BOM. It was only able to put out 7mb/s until I changed the driver according to another post in this forum. Now its working great. Grabbed 100 images today for the collision avoidance model. Hope to have it running around the science museum here in San Antonio this weekend.
Great! Thanks for the updates everyone.
Looking forward to hearing more. Hopefully everyone enjoys it at the museum.
Please let me know if you have any questions!
Best,
John