My walking robot with airsoft gun and FPV video remote control.
Uses a Pololu voltage regulator and a lot of the ready-crimped wires and housings. Probably some connectors/switches too – I forget whence they came into my parts bin.
Thank you for sharing your robot. Onyx-X looks awesome! Do you have your build written up someplace or have any video of it in action that you can share?
Cool project; I am trying to write a post for this on the Pololu blog. Which regulator and micro metal gear motor did you use? What was the gear motor used for?
I’m using three regulators:
3.3V 1A – driving the Xbee-Pro 900 XSC S3B wireless transciever, and the laser pointer
6V 0.5A – driving the OpenCM 9.04A robot logic board (it could run on 4S but gets super hot when doing so because it uses linear regulators)
Ajdustable 0.6A (set at 4.0V) – driving a “tinywhoop” style 5.8 GHz camera/transmitter used for walking and situational awareness. (I could have driven this from 3.3V but wiring made it easier to put this regulator next to the camera)
I think this is the gear motor I’m using:
Or one of the nearby gear ratios.
It’s used to drive the agitator that makes sure the plastic BBs flow into the AEG (airsoft gearbox.) Without this, the BBs would sometimes jam up, and I’d be left without a working gun!
Finally, I use a lot of Pololu pre-crimped wires for wiring harnesses.
I’ve tried crimping myself a few times, but I just can’t get it right, plus the bags of wires saves a lot of time
Btw: I find your regulators to be super delightful! Much better than the pre-made options from CUI or MuRata or whatever I can find from parts distributors.
The Murata regulators are direct drop-in replacements for the 78xx series regulators.
This means they actually cut off when input is less than 7V, which means 2S operation is right out.
Otherwise, they are nice parts with 1.5A current and up to 36V input (I never go that high) for less than a fiver.
The CUI ones are also intended as replacements, but fully potted, and thus bulkier, and also they don’t come in high current options (typically 500 mA.) They have some higher-current ones, but those are expensive and big. Still potted, though, which I guess is good if you have other bare conductors nearby or put your circuits in harsh environments or such.
The Polulu ones come in much wider range of output voltages, go higher in currents, deal better with lower input voltages, and are all around handier for general purpose DC/DC conversion when I don’t want to make my own board. I guess the Murata and CUI people assume that anyone who needs something more advanced than “I’d like to burn less power with this 7805” will just design it into their own board, because their target is designers who make between hundreds and hundreds of millions of copies …