K9 Diaries - Motor Controller Issues.

K9 wiring

The inside on K9 are pretty straight forward. There is a Sabertooth motor controller. Its a 2x32 generation 3 controller, which means it has a USB interface to an application called DEscribe. With this you can monitor the inputs and outputs, which is handy. You can also specify the battery chemistry and many other bits and pieces.

I've just fixed the motor controller location between the drive wheels, so it is no longer on top of the batteries.

The other upgrade is fitting the Arduino Nano to control the tail servo. Again a little more thought  when I was designing the wag mechanism, so there was somewhere to mount it, but ti-wraps to the rescue, and a mount from the walker robot and it is secure. The next iteration will have a dedicate mount point. The point is the tail which now wags!

I decided to fit the 4 switch elements in the control panel, and wire them, and the I2C pins of the control panel Nano to the D-type connector which I've used as an interconnect. The I2C pins are fur future use / development. One of the switches can now be used to activate the wagging.

The switches are a low level implementation but a first step in getting things going.

K9 Diaries - Whooverville 9 2017

Success, K9 was completed for Whooverville 9 at Derby Quad, his first ever outing, all the hard work was well worth it seeing the smiles on the faces of people that met him. I lost count of the number of people that complimented me on the build and a few even asked to buy him, more than my life is worth to sell him though, Debs finally has a dog and she's not parting with him lol!

I had to have a go in the TARDIS :)  K9's control panel looped through a sequence of K9 and then 200 random selections of the lights.

The screen was fully operational, although we didn't want to infringe any copyrights by playing Dr who episodes at a public event, but as well as photo capabilities, K9 has movie playing abilities on his screen via his built Raspberry Pi.

His antenna ears operated continuously for the whole event, as did his control panel, and we had his camera taking photos every 10 seconds to record what he could see during the day.

Although we did have to cut out a fair number of shots of peoples trousers. Next time we'll have a perimeter around so we get see more people and less of their bags and behinds, we'll also encourage the people to smile for K9's Timey Wimey Cam as Debs has christened it. Below is a video Debs made from the images that K9 took.

Sadly his drive broke down, some issue with the motor control / receiver which needs to be investigated but all in all it was a brilliant experience,really good to see the smiles on the faces of people young and old who wanted to meet K9 and have their photo taken with him. We're already looking forward to Whooverville 10, see you there!