Introduction
As described in my previous post, my project has sub modules. Each has a Sci Fi Purpose and it should all come together to complete project VIRUS. OR I may divert all together and do what I see more fun to do. In this post, I start with making a robot. I will try and write these posts out in the form of tutorials so that you at home can follow along. Lets make robots!
Where to start
In the movie Real Steel, the robot was recovered from a junkyard but unfortunaterly, the local junk yard here only has rotting tyres from old cars. Hence I started with scrap wood and to be very honest, this is not my first robot BUT this WILL be my third iteration on the Raspberry Pi and I will name it MinionBot Mark III. The purpose is to make a general purpose Robotic platform from scrap stuff and what not. The first thing is to make the chassis and Bill of Materials. Roughly it will be...
- Lots of scrap wood.
- wood saw.
- Extra thumb?
- Motors
- Wheels
- Screws
- Softdrink Cans(Empty) 
With all that stuff, I start my little experiment.
Making a Chassis
In order to explain the robot, I made a video which will possibly evolve into a series of videos. I already cut out a wood board into a octagonal shape with slots for the wheels and then used the soft drink cans to make Tin strips for clamps. Pretty cool huh? Here is the video of me assembling the base.
The end result is shown in the image below. I can make a motor driver like I did in a previous challenge but it does not seem to be what the masses want and hence I went on with a readymade solution- A Grove Pi+ This little pi Hat is available from www.seeedstudios.com and comes will all kinds of stuff. A motor driver widget is available and all of it is just plug and play. The code to make it run is also available from seeed and is quite simple. Once you have humpty dumpty ready, we move on to prepare a RPi
Setting up a Raspberry Pi
Now there are a gazillion tutorials on this subject and I have written some myself. If you need help setting up your pi, navigate to https://embeddedcode.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/the-geek-getting-started-guide-to-the-raspberry-pi/ and you have my version of setting up an RPi. I discuss how to setup a static IP as well which will save you a LOT of time later on. To connect to the network, I prefer using Wifi since we want THIS robot to be wireless and moving around like a small kid. For this I use the element14 wipi which is available from element14/farnell
The additional Hardware
I am still waiting for the kit to arrive and in the mean time I am using what I have. I am using the seeedstudios grove system of modules and I did a small review of the starter kit which is available here(https://embeddedcode.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/seeedstudios-groove-pi-pre-review-part-1/)
In the next post I will be going through the software part and MY version of setting up the template for our robot! Stay Tuned! 