[Jouni] built a pretty nice little two-wheeled robot a while back — but he never got it working quite right. Taking inspiration and a bit of opensource code from another hacker featured here, he’s finished the bot, and it works great!
After seeing [Jose’s] 3D printed Air Hockey bot, he poked around the creator’s blog and discovered the B-Robot, a 3D printed, two-wheeled, stepper driven, balancing robot. As it turned out, it was incredibly similar to a robot [Jouni] had made himself previously!
[Jouni’s] robot features two NEMA-17 steppers, a 12v 2200mAh battery pack, an Arduino Pro Mini, a MPU6050 gyro and a FrSky receiver. Lucky for him, [Jose’s] B-Robot made use of the same steppers and gyro! Using some of [Jose’s] code from his GitHub, [Jouni] was able to bring new life into his little robot!
We’ve included videos of both the original project, and [Jouni’s] version. Aren’t opensource projects awesome?
And the original:
Whilst self balancers are a very common project, it’s unusual to see one using steppers. I started one about a year ago to see how well they worked, but it got put on the back burner. It seems they can work pretty well. I must revive my project too.