A Robot's First Twitches
I’m building a self-balancing robot, because that seemed like a nice casual side project during my thesis. Surprisingly, it kinda works a little bit. Pretty much everything here needs to be redone in some form: the Arduino needs to sit differently in order to fit power and the USB input (for some reason I can’t run this code without a USB connection, although I can’t actually figure out why), the chassis needs to be larger, the standoffs need a better fastening system (next version probably won’t use standoffs anyway), I need motors with encoder wheels and possibly a lower gear ratio, and I should consider using a different motor shield, although this one seems manageable. But it does actually work at this point! It needs a lot of TLC to get that forward and backward motion working (and also some kind of control scheme), but it’s staying upright and self-correcting it’s position, which in this case totally counts as a minimum viable product. Not bad for a one-week build (not to mention my first ever robot).