Hi,
Towards the end of summer 2006, the Rochester Institute of Technology robotics club, MDRC, decided to design a series of workshops to get students up and running with all the different aspects of creating robots from mechanical fabrication, writing software, writing firmware (code on a microcontroller), basic circuits and electronics, and more.
I was primarily involved with designing the microcontroller workshop and wanted a cheap easy to build robot for my course. I’d already had a goal of building an inexpensive balancing robot using the Tamiya gearbox, so this was my first foray into that project.
One of the other MDRC members who participated in this process documented some of our work on his website: gameboysandrobots.com/2006/1 … m_a_1.html
This was also featured in the online version of Make Magazine: makezine.com/blog/archive/20 … obots.html
I’ll be posting details and a link to my blog for the current robot that I’m working on (for the Trinity Firefighting competition in 5 days!!!) soon.