Vexduino

vexduino1

[Jeremy] picked up a Vexplorer pretty cheap, and wanted to make it better. He decided that Arduino controls would probably be a nice upgrade. He patched into the controller and installed a nice looking plug to interface with the Arduino. He says the software was custom made as he couldn’t find suitable examples on the net. His software is available for download. We covered a picaxe controlled one in January, but it looks like that site is currently down.

Comments [6]

tagged: arduino, vexplorer

6 Responses to Vexduino

rasz says:

March 29, 2009 at 6:18 pm

all i can say about this one is – great soldering station, cant solder for shit

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2419tech. says:

March 30, 2009 at 4:58 am

Hi, I am new.

I’m addressing this to all, not specifically to Rasz:

What’s with all the negative attitudes on this website lately ?

I’ve been reading the hackaday website, and all its archives, for about a year now. It inspired me to get into electronics again. (background: chemistry). Several of my friends are getting excited as well to tinker/hack/build. None of them have a formal education as electrical engineers. (IT, art-school, etc)

Really, I’m confused as to why this social process is happening within a community of such creative people.

A (supposed) low quality of the posted articles can not be an excuse for the increase in put-down, nay-sayer, initiative-squashing type of comments.

If the articles are of mediocre or low quality, why not post a better one instead ? Or, just ignore the article if it’s crappy.

So, rather then focussing on the ‘fail’ -as someone put it recently- why not acknowledge the the effort some random person on the internet (and whos background you do not know), and suggest e.g. improvents, or at least learn how *not* to do something.

Maybe half of the negative comments are ment ironic or otherwise non-literal, but don’t forget that those subleties are mostly lost in printed text and across cultary boundaries.

Keep up the good work !

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strider_mt2k says:

March 30, 2009 at 5:21 am

rasz,

I can solder great but have no programming skills.

Everyone has strong and weak points.
That is one advantage of working in a team because folks can contribute and lend their strengths to the project.

in a forum like this maybe the thing to do would be to give a little more constructive input about what soldering practices you see that can be addressed and how to address them.

That way your energy is put towards something positive and you don’t come off like as much of a jackass.

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phyxr says:

March 30, 2009 at 7:06 am

Nice post. Remonds me of the meccano/electronics kit mashes I did many years ago.

I totally agree with 2149tech about the assholes who post the pointless negative comments. Personally I’d moderate them right back under the rock that came from. Members only comments, comments moderated.

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kevin mcguigan says:

March 30, 2009 at 7:31 am

i have the same kit. bought it for 89.00 dollars. put it all together and i would like to make some improvements/addons such as making it act autonomously. any help or ideas out there?

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Keith says:

March 31, 2009 at 11:21 am

I have the Vexplorer and the original Vex kit from Radio Shack. The first thing I did with the Vexplorer was remove the DC gear motors that it comes with and replace them with Vex servos. I modded one of the servos from the original Vex kit so that I had two continuous rotation for the wheels, and one for the shoulder. I used a regular Vex servo for the gripper. After a few hours of playing around with it under remote control, I hooked it all up to an Arduino while more batteries were recharging. Vex servos are just regular servos in a different package, so you don’t have to do anything fancy to make them work with an Arduino.

From there pretty much anything is possible.

I added sonar and a couple of contact sensors to the base and gripper. I messed around with the IR motion sensor from Radio Shack a little bit. The program would have the robot seek out a corner using sonar, turn around to face into the room, and wait for someone to enter to run at with the gripper flexing. That was pretty fun.

The last thing I did with it was to add a cheap airsoft machine gun on top of the shoulder. I interfaced it with the Arduino with a relay wired parallel to the trigger switch. I modded my hide and wait program so that it would find a corner to wait in and come out shooting while weaving back and forth. My wife did not like this. Not at all.

Really this is a pretty fun platform to play with.

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