Mr. Cube
The R-16 robot is a one cubic inch robot. It is capable of reacting to its environment with music wire whiskers. It can move and explore the perimeter of a box or a room on its own. It can also be remoted controlled using a Sony infrared remote control. It has pre-programmed reaction patterns. It is an attempt to create a one cubic inch robot that does not use surface mount technology. It turned out to be barely possible. Plated .1 inch machined pin headers and sockets were used to allow separation of the robot into halves, giving easy access to the middle of the robot. There was only room for three 1.5v batteries, so they ended up powering both the motors and the picaxe controller. Because of noise problems from the motors, this is usually not a good idea, but so far it seems to be working.
The space in this inch robot was so tight that the thickness of the 28 gauge wire insulation turned out to be a problem. I could barely put the two halves of the robot together. I estimate that at least 85% of the volume of the robot was filled with components. The problem of wire thickness in very small circuits can be solved by using 30-36 gauge magnet wire. The robot was so small that even an on-off switch was problematic. Eventually, I hope to replace the crude whiskers with infrared sensors. I have literally run out of easy to use space, so fitting anything more, without resorting to surface mount technology, will be an interesting challenge.
For more details you can check out this instructable at: Building Small Robots
Mobility: 2 gear motors- solarbotics
Control: L293
Processing: Picaxe microcontroller 18x
Sensing: Music wire whisker switches. Sony infrared remote controller.
Power: 3-lm44
Copyright, 2008
Michael Roybal
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Copyright 2007, Inkless Press