We’ve seen lots of Segway variants on Hackaday, but they don’t always have detailed instructions on how they made it… Well lucky for us, [Bob] from [Making Stuff] just finished his extensive Segway project with tons of videos of the build!
Inspired by other self-balancing scooter projects he had seen online, [Bob] wanted to try his hand at building one. So he took bits and pieces from designs he liked, and came up with his own solid looking Segway clone design. Using Google Sketchup he drew up the frame, and from there it was all hands on deck. A bit of TIG welding later and it was time for the components.
Some small slight mechanical hiccups aside, the longest part of the project was the electronics and software — getting it to work like a real Segway. After writing his own code he ran into a few roadblocks, but luckily he was able to get some help from someone at his local Maker meetup which saved a lot of troubleshooting on his end.
It reminds us a bit of this $300 home-made Segway build from a few years ago. We still haven’t had a chance to ride a real one… or a clone for that matter. Maybe Hackaday should get a company Segway built? Nah. That’d be silly.
Awesome set of videos. Really inspiring to watch and makes me want to learn to weld. However, watching him wear gloves when machining with all those spinny bits… O_o I cringe! Pretty dangerous.
Now to add the 2-stroke engine from a weed eater or chainsaw to charge the batteries when outdoors.
Since these use wheel chair motors, I am thinking I should be able to just get the whole chair base up on two wheels, and save on some welding. I hate to ditch the current factory frame since it is so well built. It would be great if it was easily convertible from 4 wheel chair with casters, to up on 2 wheels. I’m not sure why that would be great, but it would be.
I think could be also interesting for you our OpenWheel
http://www.open-electronics.org/tag/openwheels/
Lots of cool Segway type ideas…
An idea I had that I thought would be a ton of fun was to create a DJ robot.
Imagine going to a wedding dance (or whatever) and the DJ is a 5 foot tall robot that dances around, interacts with the crowd and allow us you to request songs to play by text message etc.
I thought an easy way to start this would using a kids toy called MiP which is a small robot toy that already knows how to balance on 2 wheels, dance etc and has some sort of expansion/API capability built in.
Could someone simply use that toy and attach power drivers to the stepper motor outputs to drive bigger steppers to create a full size robot? I would guess that if the toy (or its innards) were placed at a low center of gravity that it could still balance the big version of itself.
Then simply a matter of adding features to it
I wish I had the time to try it.
can u help me with the specifications of electronics used and code used
i`m interested in it, i would like to make this Segway. can you give me more details about measurement? and specifications electronics used and code?
Thx.
The link no longer works. How can I get a copy of the instructions and videos please? is there an archive somewhere?