Should have tested the motor speed before anything else, because.

Max rpm: 823
diameter: 60mm

Crunching the numbers revealed a maximum speed of 5.78 miles per hour on 7.4V, with no load. Torque decreased as speed increased. That design was busted. The L6234 motor chip required 7V, busting any single cell ideas, too.

12V got it to 1310RPM or 9mph with no load.

The stock winding had the required torque & RPM, but took 3A when stationary, decreasing to 1.3A at its top speed.

The 130 turn DT700 hit 527 RPM at 12V 0.13A with no load.

A balancing robot with the required speed would need gearboxes. The direct drive idea with rewound motors would make an excellent hobbyist robot, but not meet the required application.

Well, it definitely looks like an exact copy of the millions of other balancing robots. The problem is they all need a minimum height to have enough inertia to stay upright. Some use ballast. Some use 2 phase stepper motors. None use 3 phase brushless motors. They all use obsolete, heavy electronics. Interest in balancing robots vanished after 2007.

Many use 2 inline wheels & a large reaction wheel for horizontal balance. There are some which use a single fat wheel & no reaction wheel but probably can't turn. Many are unicycles with a large reaction wheel for horizontal balance. A control moment gyro can also be used. All of these are more cumbersome than 2 side by side wheels.

Weight shift can't balance a stationary unicycle. The problem is the astronaut problem. It needs an external force to act on it, to stay horizontally upright.

Performance of 2 wheel robots on trails is probably bad. Dirt getting in the motors is a big deal.

The balancing robot is extremely light, for what it is. A brushless gimbal sacrificed its brain & some aluminum for it. There's a huge bonus if it can run on 3.7V. So you need to find the minimum power with the recycled 7.4V board & spin a new board which can run on 3.7V if it works.

Reviewing spare parts that could make a balancing robot, there are some 8:1 gearboxes, but no suitable motors. No way to attach a bell motor to them. There are some foam wheels, which wouldn't last long. They attach directly to some bell motors, which need 1.5A, but still probably wouldn't produce enough torque. No way the shaft would be straight enough for the gears to mesh.

Direct drive brushless motors are the cheapest way to get a balancing robot. They need to go from very fine adjustments to 1132rpm. The voltage would be low for stationary balancing. It would go to maximum for all movement. Brushless motors would not automatically change speed based on grade. Current is constant for all loads. The timing of the back EMF has to be sensed to detect the load & manually adjust the speed. There is an algortihm on http://edn.com/design/analog/4368829...er-motor-stall

There are some pancake motors which have a tiny bit of clearance but probably enough torque. They either need skids for protection from rocks or slightly bigger wheels. The bearings probably wouldn't last long with a solid wheel. The days of cheap solutions are over.

The ideal motor is the bell motor.


A session of pin punching, allen wrench punching, back & forth sliding, & metal removal liberated the shaft. It was heavily jammed in.


...Continue Reading

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/08...-own-business/

First build a product, then get a customer, then get friends-and-family money (or money from revenues which is cheapest of all) and then think about raising money. But only then. Don’t be an amateur.

But you already knew that.

Trying to get Mark Cuban to invest because “this would be great for the Dallas Mavericks.”


Never happened. We solicited the Reno homebuilder, the Canadian premier, & the Singaporean billionaire, but never Mark Cuban.

I just started my business. What should I do?
Sell it as fast as possible

Something workers should keep in mind. Advancements in 3D printer technology briefly swung towards hobbyists when the Makerbot came out. After Bre Pettis sold his business to Stratasys for $1 billion, they continued to make Makerbots, but innovation once again returned to just the high end with a clear division between what would be consumer & what would be professional. Maybe it set hobbyists back 5 years, but Bre did the right thing in selling as fast as possible.


Watching amateurs fail is not pretty. Denial of reality gets wider & wider. Egos get bruised. They all eventually asked for free work because just 1 more demo would seal the deal or they were going to have money next week. If 15 years of demos couldn't seal the deal, 1 more wasn't going to do it & they never had money next week. It was better to stop working & bruise their egos than use your bank account to dig them a deeper debt hole.

Night run with the RC car. The slowest of any previous RC car run, yet it felt like maximum speed. Even had the most stops of any previous run, to fix steering crashes. The temperature was only 54F. Most likely a combination of diet & intervals the day before. The salads aren't putting out. Interval training used to require a lot more recovery time.


Installed headlights, which aided steering & visibility. No need for a headlamp. Steering was still bad, but can't improve anymore without a new vehicle. With the voltage at 7.3V, the fastest downhill part was 8m14s per mile for 1.8 miles. The same segment was 8m38s uphill. The battery seemed to have over 10.5 miles in it, despite 0.06A going to the LEDs, because of the slower speed. The gyro failed to initialize, so walked home & reflashed it with no gyro limit before the run. Total mileage is 99.2.


While pounding the pavement, the RC car idea started to seem pointless. The problem is there are electronic ways of pacing, which don't require steering. Google glass can overlay a virtual pacing object on the scene. Phones can read out the pace. These methods are not as realtime, not as precise, & aren't as tied to the real world. A previous attempt to have GPS derived pace read out every second was not accurate enough. Augmented reality overlays are really bad.


The car was more motivating, conveyed the exact pace in realtime, & could carry supplies or a camera to record the journey. Electronic pacing is still required for a race. Apparently, the sensor of choice is a footpod that measures g forces in 3 dimensions, in addition to number of strides. The trick is conveying the information to the user in realtime. Perhaps the metronome can change sounds or the phone can read out motivational sound clips. It's hard to beat a physical object.