The smart ant's and flea's

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Team RobotMad
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Team RobotMad »

Kyro wrote: Sun Aug 11, 2019 1:41 pm i was worried about this fight as low, fast wedges with good acetate usually easily overpower mantis due to no acetate and it having a high centre of ballance...
SA5 is actualy pretty slow due to being driven by a deltang which has a pretty low voltage limit and using 30:1 motors.
its replacment will be: faster, even lower, and a more powerfull flip.
Kyro wrote: Sun Aug 11, 2019 1:41 pm how easy would it be to make a 4 wheel......? 16 leg drive version
It would be easy to do, other than it takes like an hour per 'wheel' to assemble and fine tune. the main problem with this idea is that walkers have very little pushing power as theres not one constant serface gripping the floor and i don't think adding 4 'wheel' drive would solve this. Thus not much point in making one like that. I have a few ideas on changes to the mechanisum to make it have more pushing power, as the main donfall to my walkers has always been getting pushed easly. so possibly if that works and it does become good at pushing then a 4wd robot would be a good idea.
Lincoln Barnes
Maker of "SmartAnts", and other autonomous projects.
Electronic enginering student at Nottingham Trent University.
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Team RobotMad »

No actual progress on robots as im struggling to get my new desines to fit the electronics i currently use, the 'SmartBoard'.

Its fairly large at 21x28mm plus a bit on the side for the bluetooth module.
We dont use featres like the gyro which we though would make robots go in a straight line even with out of balence motors but it just dosnt work in combat as it is constently confused by being pushed by the oponent.
The bloototh module is also bulky and sticks out the side, as we still tend to use traditional remote controles you have to add an external reciver anyway.

so its time for SmartBoard V2
made smaller, curently aiming for 13.5x20mm.
using a stm32wb, that has a m4 cpu and a m0 that runs the bluetooth. so conveting completly to buletooth control.
2x 2A motor outputs, very similer but updated motor driver as we never broke one of the old ones, so if it aint broke dont fix it.
huge voltage range, 2.5v all the way up to 18V, motors run on this input voltage so dont put anything higher than the motors can handle.
1.8v logic for high efficency however not all servos will run on such a low logic voltage.
thus biult in level shifter for 2 servo outputs to have the logic at input voltage.

After the design is finished i'll have them made by PCBway as i'ts not going to be possible to solder by hand,
then once they have been working in my robots for a bit i will consider selling them if intrest is high enough.
maufactring at such a small scale is very costly so don't expect great prices.

so i guess ask questions and say if you would be intrested.
Lincoln Barnes
Maker of "SmartAnts", and other autonomous projects.
Electronic enginering student at Nottingham Trent University.
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MarkR
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by MarkR »

Seems like a lot of electronics for the smart board v2, those STM dual core processors things are 48-pin 0.5mm QFN looks pretty tricky to hand-solder, although not impossible if you design the footprint for easier hand-soldering.

Also, maybe the design of that board will be a little complicated, the reference board design I see shows 16 capacitors (many different values), 3 inductors, 2 crystals, and a few other components.

I was looking at doing something slightly similar using the nrf52 chips, it has only one core, but there are lots of modules available which provide all the passive components and antenna on a really compact module, such as the https://www.fanstel.com/bt832-1 bc832 module (8x9mm), it could stack on another pcb with voltage regulator and motor drivers, and make a very small ant/flea controller.
Robots: Betsie - RaspberryPi controlled flipper bot with gyro stablisation - too clever for her own good?
Stacie - tidy flipper; 4wd driven by hair bands
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Team RobotMad »

MarkR wrote: Mon Nov 11, 2019 9:47 am Seems like a lot of electronics for the smart board v2, those STM dual core processors things are 48-pin 0.5mm QFN looks pretty tricky to hand-solder, although not impossible if you design the footprint for easier hand-soldering.

Also, maybe the design of that board will be a little complicated, the reference board design I see shows 16 capacitors (many different values), 3 inductors, 2 crystals, and a few other components.
I'm not confident i could hand solder them and the board uses a couple of components that it would be pretty imposible to hand solder.
i'm well awere the dual core stm32 is way overpowered for this, i chose it beacuse the smt32 seires are quite easy to use and this one has biult in bluetooth, loads of ram and flash.

If you don't design for the absloute lowest power consumption possible the number of external components reduces to just a few decoupling caps and one crystal.
The design is still very complex, fitting a bluetooth antena that dosen't suck, a motor driver, pads big enough to solder wires too, the level shifting, the ldo, and a programing conector. into such a small space is not going to be easy.
MarkR wrote: Mon Nov 11, 2019 9:47 am I was looking at doing something slightly similar using the nrf52 chips, it has only one core, but there are lots of modules available which provide all the passive components and antenna on a really compact module, such as the https://www.fanstel.com/bt832-1 bc832 module (8x9mm), it could stack on another pcb with voltage regulator and motor drivers, and make a very small ant/flea controller.
On the SmartBoard v1 we used a raytac mdbt40 ble module which used the nRF51822, we dont realy use the blutooth that much and it wasn't the main cpu
Lincoln Barnes
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by MarkR »

As far as the microcontroller goes- yes, use whatever will work for you, low power is definitely not a requirement, even the non-low-power chips use only a few milliamps, it's nothing, a single medium-bright led probably will draw more current.

Does it need a lot of external radio gubbins such as capacitors, inductors? I assume it's a pcb trace antenna I know there are plenty of reference designs knocking around which will probably perform well enough for robot combat.

Also I should mention that my robot Betsie uses Bluetooth (classic, not low-energy) on a Raspberry Pi zero, I've never had any trouble with interference even in the massive rumbles.
Robots: Betsie - RaspberryPi controlled flipper bot with gyro stablisation - too clever for her own good?
Stacie - tidy flipper; 4wd driven by hair bands
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Team RobotMad »

MarkR wrote: Mon Nov 11, 2019 11:38 am Does it need a lot of external radio gubbins such as capacitors, inductors? I assume it's a pcb trace antenna I know there are plenty of reference designs knocking around which will probably perform well enough for robot combat.
I've found a tiny component st have made to take care of all the inpedence matching network and harmonic filtering RF stuff. im going to use a chip antena as it takes up less space than a pcb trace antena, i'm currently strugling with getting it far enough away from other components and ground planes.
Lincoln Barnes
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Team RobotMad »

For now smartboard v2 is paused. The design is basicaly done i just can't justify the cost of maufature right now on a student budget.

so for Ant Freeze the same 3 robots ive been running for the last year will be in attendence. They have been extreamly lucky in nealy never coming up against spinners. Unorthodox is yet to face one. i somewhat expect that luck to run out and have been planning a few new designs for replacements.

my 10 deggre wedge design cannot be made until SmartBoard v2 as theres just not enough space. the spinner thats been in the works for years needs some investment to get the spinning bar made, student budget stops this but i may still do this in the summer.
so eve come up with a design simmular to unorthodox but a bit difrrently arranged, this will probably get built after AntFreeze befor AWS61.
Lincoln Barnes
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Electronic enginering student at Nottingham Trent University.
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by MarkR »

Cool,

I'm working on a super-tiny receiver/esc combo board, using the A7105 module (which is the radio chip needed for AFHDS2A protocol) and it's looking promising, still in the prototype / design stage but will probably work.

If I can make it work, it should be about ~ 20x32mm total size, and will weigh <4 grams. Will drive 3 channels brushed+ one PWM output, power will be 1-2S lipo capable, and output current of about 1A per channel (ok for 1x N20, borderline for two in parallel).

I recently discovered that I can solder a QFN24 0.5mm pitch chip and it works.

Image

One problem at the moment is the thickness is a bit more than I'd like, as the A7105 module contains an absolutely *huge* crystal which is > 4mm thick, I don't understand why they needed to use such a big crystal, other modules don't. I might try replacing the crystal if I can get a smaller replacement, but that may be tricky.
Robots: Betsie - RaspberryPi controlled flipper bot with gyro stablisation - too clever for her own good?
Stacie - tidy flipper; 4wd driven by hair bands
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Kyro
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by Kyro »

i would be very interested in this rx/esc combo if it could reliably take 2 n20's per channel... (i do love my 4wd and my flysky stuff)

if future development of this does allow for 2 n20's per channel, then sign me up...

also, happy to help with testing if needed... its rare there is something like this developed for flysky protocol...
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Re: The smart ant's and flea's

Post by MarkR »

The present prototype I have uses rz7899 chips which can certainly drive enough current, but that board is quite a bit bigger (about 30x30 mm)
Robots: Betsie - RaspberryPi controlled flipper bot with gyro stablisation - too clever for her own good?
Stacie - tidy flipper; 4wd driven by hair bands
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