Arduino Nano 33 IoT
I was very excited to receive Nano 33 IoT! I opened the package and was surprised by the size of it and how much flexibility it delivers, mainly WiFi, Bluetooth and IMU, all on the same board. This makes it perfect for virtually all applications that involves movements, recording, and connectivity.
Motors + gears
I don't have a lot of cash to spend on hobbies so I usually look around on Gumtree and similar places where I can find some broken appliances and machines that are good enough to salvage parts from. Recently, I got my hands into a proper office printer that was useless to the owner. I painstakingly loaded (believe me, it weighs like half a tonne!) it into my MPV car and dismantled most of it on my drive way. Anyways, from all the parts that I salvaged, there were quite a lot of BLDC, stepper and DC motors along with high quality gears and gearboxes. So, I took a unit containing BLDC motor to use in this project.
Mechanical frame
As you may have noted from my previous blog that I was going to use some kind of conventional chair and modify it. However, with that option, there was going to be a lot of fiddly work trying to design around previous design, if you know what I mean. A fresh design would give some flexibility in terms of designing the frame around the components that need to be fitted in so I opted to use a wooden frame initially to provide a structural support as well as very easy to work with initially.