Important news about HackSpace

We have some important news to share about HackSpace: Issue 81 was the last issue of HackSpace as a standalone magazine, and HackSpace has become part of The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine. Starting with issue 145, We’ll be adding pages to The MagPi to make room for the stories and tutorials you’ve come to expect from HackSpace.

Alexander Kirillov wanted a robot that he could use as a teaching platform at SigmaCamp, a science-based summer camp in the USA. He looked at Poll’s Zumo robot, DF Robots’ Maqueen Plus, and Pimoroni’s Trilobite – all fine platforms, but none of them satisfied all of Alexander’s requirements. He wanted something compact, extendable, with a decent number and variety of sensors, and programmable in Python. Unable to find a device that matched these requirements, he decided to build his own.

He’s used silicone tracks and 6 V, 75-gear ratio micro metal gear motors, both by Pololu, an ESP32-S3 Feather board by Adafruit as the main controller, and designed a custom board to handle low-level operations such as maintaining consistent motor speed.

The sensors are where things get really interesting: among other things, there’s a 6 DOF Inertial Motion Unit (IMU), which can be used for determining robot orientation; two front-facing laser time-of-flight sensors, for detecting obstacles; and no fewer than seven sensors facing the ground, to enable line-following tasks.


https://hsmag.cc

From HackSpace magazine store

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