[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bcoAqKhdL4]
[Shachar Geiger] sent in an interesting project that he worked on with [Tal Avivi] at the Bezalel academy in Jerusalem. They were given the task of designing a 1-person electrical urban vehicle. They took some cues from MIT’s Transology and designed the OmniDirectional Research Platform (ODRi). There’s a video of it embedded above. It can be driven using three different input styles: an accelerometer joystick, a traditional gamepad, or body mass shift. They started with an Arduino, but needed more I/O and had to switch to a Wiring board (this was before the Mega). The platform is built mostly from scrap. The accelerometers were placed in an old Microsoft Sidwinder. The standard joystick is from a Sega Mega Drive. The weight sensors are out of cheap home scales.
they could of use the Wii Numchuck to same money and time.
It was locking up from friction with a ~150lb person on it. It took work to make it omnidirectional though.
That’s pretty cool, though pretty slow.
Great music too :P
I agree with Jerome too, a Wiimote would be way better and would mean they can get rid of the cable.
Wake me up when it can hover :P
a wiimote would of been cool, but in the video clip above it notes that it was built from scrap parts/materials. would like to see a future version with a wiimote though.
Anything on the drive system? Looks pretty fluid.
That looks like a whole heap of fun to make – but if it had problems with a 150lb pilot, it’s going to die if I step on there… I think I’ll need an industrial-duty version :-)
We presented it in 2 events so far. On the second one, one of the battery packs died pretty soon (scrap…) so it didn’t work as expected, but on the first event, it carried some pretty big people :)
About the drive system – we took cheap 100W motors from scrap electric scooters, so we used 2 for each wheel. We built each wheel it’s own driver based on six LMD18200. All of them are driven open-loop usin Arduino/Wirin PWM outputs.
Are you sure the accelerometers were added to the Sidewinder? I have one of those, and it has its own accelerometers. And it’s a fully functional standard joystick.
It was an old microsoft sidewinder force-feedback joystick (not the gamepad). Those little MEMS accelerometers weren’t invented yet when it was bought…
This looks more like it inspired by Stephen Killough’s omnidirectional holonomic platform developed at ORNL in the early 90s: http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=Vx4eAAAAEBAJ&dq=5374879 , not MIT’s “transology”.