I apologies for the long delay; I have been busy with school and the evil (from my respective :D) double summer back-to-back (seriously a 15 minute smoke break isn't enough) final in Calculus III [Math 273] and Asian Philosophy [Asia 315]. Philosophy makes me feel dirty inside (sort of), but I'm glad I took the class, I wrote about the ethics of autonomous war machines relate to taoism and how pirates are truly relate to global warming (causal and correlative thought, make ideas connect despite their polarity), the freedom of that class gave me a break from the rigid structures of engineering.

Now to the meat... my current rendition of panzerbot is going to a conference to show off it's ability to follow black lines (thanks to the reflectance sensors mentioned in the previous post. While my bot is on vacation I'm working on a new chassis for it, that is going to replace the servos with a pair of brushless DC motors for added power and feedback (important). Jack Hagermeister (WSU Robotics Club Advisor) gave me the base chassis and I am going to take my dremel to it, to "enhance" it's capabilities (i.e. make it work with my design). I will post some more info on this development branch as it become available

A final statement, I may have lost track of what information I promised to post; if so feel free to email me pk!ramer/ws!u/edu!; where the "/" associate their appropriate characters and the "!" are removed.

A belated update, but within the last week I have been designing an IR reflectance sensor network for Panzerbot using an idea of one my professors, detailed below.

The dark nodes on the bottom of the tank are "Fairchild QRB1134" photo-reflectance sensors and will be used to detect and follow blacks lines on a light background

I spent several hours today detailing the chassis with a camouflage motif; my paints came in yesterday and decided to amuse my self with some painting. Not practical but it looks cool and that's all that matters other than making the robot work.

Here is the current mockup of Panzerbot; I am currently detailing the Cerebot II board seen on top (I was unimpressed with just using the texture of the board; so I modeled it)

Another slow day, spent most of my time on my Calculus III homework and a little Asia 315 (Oriental Philosophy/Religion) reading; anyway I added some servos to my model. I modeled the tank plating but it didn't align up right so I'm re-dimensioning the model to verify and rectify that it is correct. Here is what I have so far:

Not much to report today, once again; I finished the primary Boe-Bot model which you can see the results in the following image:

Not much to report today as I have been busy with summer classes which started immediately after spring semester ended; I have been working on a full model of the robot to help me figure out a good implementation of the translation plate. Here is a sample of what I have been working on.

So I walked down (Thanks to the GPSA voting down the transit fee, there is no Sunday bus service) to the robotics lab to pick up my dial caliper to reverse engineer the Boe-Bot chassis.. Which would be necessary due to the dimensioned drawing that they were nice enough to make available on the Internet is just terrible and almost worthless.

Well this is great and all, but there are a few problems with this drawing:

• It is in metric, which isn't a problem per say (I prefer metric) but the chassis was designed using standard units and then converted to metric after the fact for reasons I don't even want to fathom [Insert Drum Roll Please] I figured this out while questioning why a Mechanical Engineer (Mechie) or Nub-cake (Wannabe Mechie) would decide that 69.9mm was a good dimension to use... I looked up what 69.9mm was in standard measurements and found it was 2 3/4" with rounding errors. After this I used my trusty dial caliper [See Image after the list] and discovered that all the measurements were in 1/64" denominations. The part was designed in standard measurements but documented in metric... What the hell?

• The dimensions did not include any orientation measurements, in other words I know where all the holes relate to each other in the part but their exact location is ambiguous. A proper CAD drawing needs to have a orientation measurement so that it can be reproduced according to the original designers design; this drawing doesn't have this and in such is worthless without having a sample of the part in question. Again the DIAL CALIPER IS YOUR FRIEND, don't trust CAD drawings, verify that what it states is what it actually is. Anyway in the next day or so I'll post a good CAD drawing of the mounting points, to assist anyone who actually reads this blog.

NEWS:

I broke one of the rubber tank treads of the Boe-Bot tank kit and tried to glue it back together with an adhesive called Liquid Nails ® by Perfect Glue ™, as it stated that it worked best on rubber to rubber bonds; It's terrible, in my honest opinion it is the lobotomized cousin to rubber cement. It has almost no tensile strength so it does nothing to bond rubber to rubber as it states. I'm going to go shopping for a adhesive that does a chemical bond to rubber instead of this Elmer's paste like junk that is this product.

After taking a look at the default EE234 chassis from the Cerebot II robotics kit, I was not impressed. But then again I am the current president of the WSU Robotics Club (WSURC), so I have high standards; ridiculous at times it seems. Anyway, I decided to go with the Parallax Inc.^© Boe-Bot tank tread kit and standard chassis.

Tank Tread Kit - $35
Standard Chassis - $24

$59 is a little pricey when taking into account the original kit would set you back $180, but in my opinion it is well worth it. I am currently working on a translation plate design so that I can mount the Cerebot board and accessories to the parallax chassis and will post all the relevant information when I am finished so that others can do the same.

If you are interested in seeing what the original looks like, pictures and info can be found here: Digilent Inc.^© Robotic Starter Kit