Episode: 3522
Title: HPR3522: Set up your Robot Building Lab and build a $0 Robot Platform
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3522/hpr3522.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:57:54

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3522 for Tuesday 1st of February 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Set Up Your Robot Building Lab and Build a Dollar Zero Robot
Platform.
It is hosted by Mekat Roliak and is about 26 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Ep 1 of Robot Warlords of the Apocalypse, Build a Free Robot Platform
Sash Krashberg if I'm old-printers.
Hey little men, greetings, this is Mekat Roliak, the mildly malevolent Mekatronics megalomaniac
with episode 1 of Robot Warlords of the Apocalypse.
We're going to be setting up your robot building lab and building your first platform,
Krashbuggie.
So I hope you do join up in this project of bringing to life the dead, the EOL, the discarded
electronics products.
If you don't join, you might just end up like the subject of an HR Geeger painting.
Remember, be the assimilator, not the assimilated.
So let's get started.
Stuff you're going to want to order to follow the instructions that I'm going to impart
to you.
So I'm going to need an Arduino Uno or a kit.
I'd recommend getting a kit with the sensors.
I got the super learning kit by Key Studio and it contains a ton of stuff that will really
get you up to speed in what sensors are, sensors, they return a voltage based on stimuli.
So Arduino can read that also some return a variable resistor value, but it's all voltage
in the end.
So it's really handy and you'll be able to add sensors and stuff much more readily to
your robot if you understand how they work beforehand.
The kits come with a Perfboard or not a Perfboard, what's it called?
Breadboard, it'll contain a breadboard and other useful stuff like wires to hook everything
up with.
So do that, you can order some extra Arduinos as well, order some extra Arduinos.
You can order Arduinos Nannos as well, they're slightly smaller, but a little bit less
robust.
I've gone with Arduino Uno from my first build.
My second robot build is using a Nannos, so it depends on what you want.
Uno, I'll be describing Uno, so he may as well get an Uno if you're just starting.
Go to your welding shop, locally get some small machine screws of various lengths, like
from like a half inch to two inches, something like that, various thicknesses with nuts
and washers, make sure you get the nuts and washers too, because you're going to be using
that to mount your Arduino and other stuff onto your platform and to actually put the
platform together, an 18654 cell battery compartment.
Yeah, of course you're going to be ordering this online from either AliExpress or Bang
Good or Amazon, whatever you use.
I use AliExpress, it's the cheapest, it might take you a week or two, but you know
that weight can be advantageous, because when I blew up a H bridge module, and I was
waiting, I just started building my own and I built my own.
So the 18654 cell battery compartment, that'll give you 16 bolts, which will run your
H bridges, which will run your motors, so that's pretty important.
Two 18651 cell compartments, I use one for powering the MP3 player, so you might not need
two, but if you get an 18655 charger, a wavegat, plug into a USB via mini USB power, and
you can charge your 18655 from those.
So you combine one of these little wavegat chargers, they're just a board, they're like
not even one inch by one inch board, and you can hot glue that onto your one cell charger
and then solder wires to the terminals, then you have a charging device right there.
If you have one of those USB battery cases, you know the little things, those hold usually
to 18655 inside those, so you might be able to take one of those apart and just use that
as your charger.
So there you go, very post-apocalyptic, ready.
As you're going to want a soldering station, you're going to want to buy some solder or
flux, and a solder sucker is very handy, if you're going to be removing desodering stuff
from circuit boards, guess what, tree sap also works, yeah, that's what rosin is.
So if you got, if you are in a post-apocalyptic scenario, you've got no solder, you can use
tree sap, and it'll make the solder flow that's on your circuit boards, and you can reuse
it.
Perth board, perth board is simply a nylon perforated board, it's got a bunch of little holes,
you can put your leaded electronics components into that.
I used it to build my H bridge module out of relays, not really an H bridge, but it reverses
the polarity to the motor, so you can make it go backwards and forwards.
But if you're not keen, if you're not too keen on soldering, you can just get one of
the L298N H bridge modules.
I used two for more power, one to control the front wheels, one to control the back wheels,
but that's up to you, you can experiment, that's what we're all about.
Extra do-pont wires, good idea, there's an email to mail wires, just to hook your stuff
up.
You should be able to get a lot of wires out of stuff that you take apart as well, especially
TVs and stuff like that, save all your wires, get extra resistors, yes, you can desotter
all the resistors you need, but it might take a while until you get the component values
that you want, and you're going to want a bunch that are 1K, you're going to want some
of their 200 ohms, whatever.
Optionally, ultrasonic sensors and MP3 modules are things that I added to my first
bot, which I call the herald interceptor, it's the heralds, because it's got an MP3
player on it, with a speaker that I stole from a television set, and as I mentioned L298N H
bridge modules, they'll run you like three or four bucks, so it might as well get two or four of
those, means we'll get four if you're going to get two to use for your device. Tools and
accessories, as I mentioned, solder station, you're going to need a computer with internet to put
your IDE for the Arduino on, Raspberry Pi, three works as well, all right, so if you're listening
to this blood stain slave slab that you found discarded, yeah, you should have downloaded all
the libraries and stuff, but hopefully you still have internet access, you can go to our
doeno.cc, download and install the Arduino IDE, and you're going to need basic tools like
screwdriver's pliers, airplane snips, which is you're going to, if you're going to cut metal
to reinforce your things, you're going to need airplane snips, they work really well for cutting
a drill with assorted bits, you're going to want like small, pretty small bits, like
I don't know, three millimeters, something like that, and you're going to want like a three quarter
centimeter or one centimeter bit, a hacksaw, be handy to cut down those metal rods, a ruler,
and a multimeter, multimeter, very important for checking your stuff. To organize your stuff,
you're going to want a parts drawer, you can get those for like 40 bucks at home hardware,
and they've got about 30 or 40 plastic drawers, put all your goodies in there, as well as several
rubber made bins or cardboard boxes for all those circuit boards, ABS pieces, the steel rods and
stuff that you recover from printers, put them in there, get rid of your wife if she complains.
Okay, so collect and assemble your post apocalyptic scraps. So a safety note, be careful when
disassembling stuff, use pliers rather than your fingers as much as possible, printers and other
products can sometimes be tricky to take apart. There might not be visible screws. There might
just be tabs, but if you try to force the tabs and it's wrong, the ABS is strong, but it's brittle,
so when it breaks it can be sharp, so just be aware of that. Laptop batteries definitely be careful
with those. Try not to short any circuits. You can be cutting these really thin metal strips that are
behind between the cells when you take the part laptop or power tool batteries, and those metal
strips are very, very sharp when you cut them. So be careful, use pliers, metal cutters, and try not
to create any short circuits if you do. They're just going to possibly be an exothermic reaction,
especially if you pierce a battery. I've only done that with one of the flat cells and it
starts smoking and I threw it outside. All right, so to get ingredients, printers are one of the
best sources, great source of mechanical and chassis parts, including motors. The best are the
ones with the scanners built in, which means you get an extra stepper motor and you get glass
on top, which you can use to build a solar panel if you have those little cells that you can order
from AliExpress or whatever. Your DC motors, a mid-sized printer is going to have two that are
exactly the same. So if you have two printers, roughly the same size, usually you'll get exactly
like four of the same size motors. And depending on your printers, it might be slightly smaller,
larger. There are about four centimeters from end to end, which is the ones I use. You can use
smaller large ones. You can use two smaller in the back or two larger, you know, in the front or
back, whatever, switch them around. So things you're going to find in the printer, the steel rods.
So the steel rods will have wheels with rubber tires on them, because that's the paper
path, how it moves the paper around. And you can slide those wheels off and those are going to be
the wheels for our robots. You can also use toys and stuff, but this is pretty convenient when
it's all in one spot. So to that, other stuff you find in the printer gears, specialty steel plates,
reed switches, rotary encoders, IR switches, lots of ABS parts. So there's a lot of neat ABS
parts, like levers and hinge, neat stuff. The one power supply box I used as the Arduino box,
because it perfectly is the same size as the Arduino Uno. So I use that to protect the Arduino
like I said, the glass panel can be repurposed as a solar panel. UPS devices, the uninterruptible power
supplies are good for relays and optical isolators. Like I said, if you're going to build your own
H bridge, you're going to need some relays and optical isolators. If not, you can skip that.
TVs for lots of wire speakers, more optical isolators, lots of transistors and other components,
especially in older TVs, laptops, power tools, cell phones, you're going to get your batteries from
those. So that's about all I can think of for ingredients right now, just any post consumer electronics,
take it home, take it apart unless it has a radioactive symbols on it or some one caveat for
printers is there is a ink reservoir in a lot of printers. So be careful being stained of ink,
that's a big hazard being ink stained. So books libgen.is if you want to read some electronics
books, that's a good one. And there's a free book by donation, it's called designing electronics
that work, I believe I'll put link in this description for that as well. All right, so now that we've
got our ingredients gathered and got a solder station, all our tools ready, hopefully you have a
table to put it all on. When I was a kid, I used to work on the floor all the time, it gives you a
sore back. Yeah, so get a table to put your stuff on. All right, so as a promise, we're going to
build a smash buggy, which is basically your platform, which is going to be a case like a DVD case
or a CD player case. The first one I used was actually a hard drive tray, and it actually had
four holes, which accommodated the motors perfectly, because there's a little kind of a hub
around the spindle on your DC motors, and it's about a centimeter or so. So you've got to need a
larger hole in your chassis to put those. And well, hopefully you know the convention
where for attaching wheels, motors, you know, like two on each side type thing, equally spaced,
you know, like a car. So do that. So with mine, all I had to do was drill some smaller holes to
attach the screws and screw them in, because there are screws that come with the motor. So when
you take the printer apart, make sure you save those screws, just screw them right back into the
motor when you take them apart. Okay, so hopefully you have got your motors all positioned there on
the spindles around the outside. Okay, now this is the most fraught with difficulty part,
which probably could use some innovations as well, but I've succeeded pretty well.
The secret is JB weld basically, but if you pull out your motors, they're going to usually have
a gear on them, always. And sometimes those gears will fit perfectly into the holes on the wheels
that are the sides of those steel rods. And yeah, count yourself lucky if you got that. Sometimes
you might have to remove the gears from the motor spindle if they're not perfect, you know,
if they're not going to fit perfectly into those wheels that you have. If you have to take the
wheels off, make sure to brace one side or hold it, hold the side of the spindle with pliers or
something, because you don't want to pull the spindle right out of the innards of your motor.
Oh, probably, that'll wreck the motor. So, yeah. Yeah, so if you're lucky enough to have
motor with the gears already on it to attach your printer roller wheels, that's great,
because so if you've already got those gears on the motor and they actually fit perfectly into
the holes in those wheels, just add some hot glue and you should be good to go if like if they're
snug. Yeah, the two that I found for my robot were snug, very good. And two were not, so I had to
take those gears off and find a replacement hub. So what I settled on, it's not perfect, but
it lasts pretty good. And there's still the weak point of where the spindle actually attaches,
but it's a lot better. So what I did was took some coax wire, I think it's RG6 or something,
so this is slightly smaller coaxial wire, you know, for your cable vision. So you cut that into
like a centimeter or whatever is perfect to fit into your hub hole in the wheel. You're going to
take out the copper center conductor, because you're going to be pushing that onto your spindle.
And you're going to want to use your JB weld in this case or epoxy. I find the JB weld works
really well. It's steel infused epoxy. So that's going to be your build for the wheels. So hopefully
you got your wheels all on with minimal struggle. Now you're going to be taking your 18650 cells.
I usually too will work for this. So you tape two together. You can use elastic bands to hold
on the wires. So we're going to be attaching the wires. I would suggest soldering wires to the
motors. So you can touch those wires to your battery compartment that you made by taping two
cells together and test which way the wheels turn. So you're going to want all your wheels to be
turning the same direction unless you're testing the differential steering, in which case the ones
on the right will be going the opposite direction to the ones on the left, making it spin around
like a maniac. So this is just to kind of to give you like when you're drawing a drawing,
you're going to draw the eyes first to give life to the picture. So this gives life to your robot
project. You're going to know that the motors at least work. So I would, if you want to do this,
this isn't the, this isn't absolutely necessary, but it's, I think it's fun and it'll give you
insight into how fast this thing will be with two cells. I mean, I use four and then I graduate
to five, but so there's no age bridge, there's no control or anything. We're just testing the
mechanics exclusively. So once you've got your motor turning the way you want, you're going to
be tying all the wires together from, so you take the one side, the one terminal, whatever determines
your positive that makes them spin one way and just bind all those wires together. You've got the
mall soldered. So it's going to be one wire from each motor. You've got them soldered to the motor
end and then you twist them at the end where they're going to be connecting to your cells and do this,
do the same for the other terminal. So you've got, you're going to have two wires, one connecting to
one terminal and two, I mean, two sets of four wires and one connecting to each terminal on each
respective motor. Just, just check out the, just check out the video. I don't, hopefully this is
described well enough, but once you do that, it can kind of flimsly attach it to your cell,
put it on top. You've got, now you've got your platform with wheels spinning madly and just set it
on the floor and watch it smash into something and when it does crash, it'll just, when it does crash,
theoretically, the wires will come loose and so that's your test. So that kind of will give you
something to look forward to. Another pointer on the chassis themselves, like I said, I
recommend like a DVD case or CD case or hard drive tray. I've also used a power tool battery box
for my second one, but that's a little bit more involved because you have to make standoffs for
the motors, but we won't talk about that. So if you're building it out of a DVD case, you're probably
just going to like use the one side of it because to put it together, I mean, you got your motor sitting
there, so you're probably not going to be able to fit the top of the DVD case on the way it was.
So it's, if you want to put the top on, it's going to be like sitting on top kind of built up,
like the latest cars in the latest road warrior movie and Fury Road and got those cars stacked
on each other. It's going to be sort of like that. But anyway, I hope that gives you starting off
point and, you know, just a point of excitement, you know, whatever you decide to do, it'll at least show
you what it's capable of. If it's not fast enough, add another cell, you know what series is,
hopefully, hopefully you can look up what series is and what parallel is. The cells are in series,
the motors are connected to the cells and parallel should work out for you. So next time I'll be
showing how to make sense of it all. So next time I'll be showing how to make your insane crash buggy
be controllable via Arduino and H bridges. So until then, this is mechatroniac signing off,
check me out bitchute.com mechatroniac. And remember, be the assimilator, not the assimilated.
Endorsement, non-paid endorsement for key studio super learning kit for Arduino. And this is
like several years old. Comes with a nice booklet, a nice green clear case with all the components in it
and a resistor sticker, which is nice. But listen to all the stuff that's in this kit. You get five
each of blue red and yellow LEDs. You get an RGB LED. You get a bunch of 220 ohm resistors, 10k
resistors, 1k resistors. So those are always handy. I recommend ordering extra resistors as well.
Those kind of lower values, very, very useful, but you can desotter them off certain boards as well. It's
just harder to find resistors that are like a lot of the same value and you're going to be one,
like four of the same value and worth each year. If you are building the H bridge yourself,
otherwise you don't have to worry about it. But it comes with as well a potentiometer buzzer,
active buzzer, passive buzzer, four large button switches, two tilt switches, three-fourter
resistors, one flame sensor, an LM35 sensor, which I've used heat. And 74HC 595N 16-pin dip I see,
which I think it's a multiplexer, a 7-segment LED, four module 7-segment LED, an 8-by-8 LED matrix,
16-02 LCD display, which is not funny, you can have those readouts. IR receiver and IR remote control.
So this really helps me because I use remote control with my robots IR. So I'm able to use
just like TV remote now. Servo motor, a stepper driver module, stepper motor, a joystick module,
relay module, a PIR motion sensor, an analog gas sensor, a three-axis acceleration module,
HC-S-R04 sensor, which is ultrasonics, which I incorporated into the parallel interceptor.
Clock module, temperature and humidity sensor, soil sensor, RFID module, RFID card, RFID's key,
pin headers, 830-hole breadboard. Breadboard is really handy. You can use that to hold your
components while you're experimenting with new H bridges. Just put it right on your bot. You can use
and not have to actually have like a formal circuit board. It comes with a DuPont connector wires,
which are just put everything up with those and jumper wires. A 6-cell battery pack, you can go
this way. This is for AA batteries. I like the lithium 18650 cells, but if you do mind the 18650s,
two, two, because they're 1.5 volts each, and a USB cable. So and it's got a nice, nice description
of everything and a website that you can go to to download all the code so you don't have to
type everything out like back in the comment or 64 days.
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