The motors that we had ordered for the robot turned out to be a bit sluggish at 7.2V so we decided to order some new motors. The new motors are rated 1280rpm at 6V and should give a real boost if run at full speed. At this higher rating the new motors also consume too much current for the motor driver that we had been using so that would need to be upgraded.
We found an alternative motor driver that would be powerful enough to power the new motors. Unfortunately with the new motor driver also requires a lot more wires so the robot is getting a bit more complex as a result. For a robust connection we found that terminal blocks work well for the motor wires but I guess they do look a bit clunky.
The robot has a camera at the front and the hope is that we will use this for the line following challenge. That is, if we will ever find time to work on the software to do it.
The robot has two raspberries – one for communicating with the controller and controlling the motors, and the other eventually to deal with the higher level autonomous challenges. It would probably not be necessary to use two raspberries like this but we thought we’d save some development time and avoid problems with response times, control latency and general stability by using this setup. The idea is that the raspberries will communicate with each serially via the UART.
Hopefully this is now the final version to use at the competition – now on to work on the software…!