Underwater ROV

September 24, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

[SpaceShipOne] has built this very nice looking under water ROV. It is still a work in progress, but nearly complete. This ROV is a fairly simple construction. most of the body parts are held together using zip ties. There’s no microcontroller and no custom boards. He’s using a radio control transceiver that was intended for airplanes to control some standard speed controllers and servos. For thrust, he pulled the motors out of some bilge pumps and fitted them with propellers. He’s only tested it once, but promises videos from the lake soon. He mentions [Jason Rollette] several times since [Jason] has done both simple and complex designs in the past.

Wifi Robot : A Hacked WRT54GL Rover

August 28, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

[Jon Bennett] sent us this link to his Wifi Robot. After playing with a Linksys WRT54GL router, he was inspired to build something that would utilize this embedded Linux system. Using a thrift store R/C truck, he built a wireless robot rover. This thing can be controlled over the internet, or by laptop with a range of about 500 meters.

The router has been modified to have 2 Serial ports and a 1GB SD Card. It connects to a micro controller, which could be an Arduino or AVR Butterfly. He has supplied information for both. The truck has been mostly gutted, leaving only the chassis and electronics. He had to beef up some of the truck electronics when they fried under the load. The entire unit is powered by a pair of 7.2 Volt 3800 mAh battery packs. The most important thing on the list though, is the horn. You can honk the horn while you are driving this thing around.

The site supplies tons of information including pictures of his build, videos of it in action, speed tests, schematics, software downloads, and resource links. Great job [Jon].

British Bots Compete For Attention

August 18, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 1 Comment

The British military held a competition to find the newest batch of robotic surveillance drones. The article mentions that they compete in a mockup village, but sadly we don’t get to see any of the action. We strongly recommend watching the video so you can see some of the robots. There is an interesting helicopter concept that has angled props for better stability and lateral motion, but more importantly you get to see the little guy pictured above. He very well could be Wall-E’s great grandfather. Though his constant buzzing around during the interviews is slightly annoying, his little camera mount looking all around is instantly endearing. If he doesn’t win this contest, he may have a shot at the [crabfu] challenge.