RIP Cybot

This is my Cybot. I constructed it during my high school years as a result of a long lasting subscription to real robots magazine. At £3.99 an issue it was kindly funded by my mum. In its prime it could drive about of its own accord dodging obstacles, it could follow a torch, it could follow a drawn line path, it could sing and dance, it could be remote controlled, it could play football, it could be voice controlled, it could be programmed and it had a half complete buddy robot called TOM. However, after my own tampering broke Cybot a few years ago I though it was about time that I harvested its organs for future use. In particular the motor, gearbox and wheel set up looked pretty handy.

So now I am down one Cybot but have gained 2 motors, 2 LDR’s, 2 sonar emitters and receivers, a piezoelectric speaker, a dual 7 segment display, an infra-red diode, 2 LED’s, a whole heap of screws and dividers and various other bits and bobs I either don’t know the names of and/or don’t know how to use.

So using the motors (and a whole heap of unexpected effort due to a dodgy project board) I constructed a H-bridge so that I could program the direction of the motors rotation.

The H-bridge runs on an isolated circuit powered by 9V while the PICAXE chip runs on a voltage regulated circuit of 5V. As already said, this took far longer than it should have due to a faulty bread board not making connections when it should have which resulted in rather lacklustre motor rotation. A chat with Tom Hulbert about this and I think I am just going to buy a H-Bridge driver, save a whole heap of hassle with transistors and diodes. Until that arrives though I’ll mess about with this, make another one, and see how I can get 2 motors running in sync.