Last year we ran a cool CoasterBot build project and contest on MAKE. We had dozens of awesome entries, from the most basic to the quite elaborate. This Make: Project shows you how to make just about the simplest CoasterBot imaginable. From here you can add new sensors and features and build on the basic bot-building knowledge you learn in this project.
Projects from Make: Magazine
One-Hour CoasterBot
Build a basic programmable robot experimentation platform in about an hour, using a tiny Arduino clone, some hacked servomotors, and a couple of dead CDs (aka "coasters").
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Flattr
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link
Steps
Advertisement
Step #1: Gather Your Parts
- You can either gather the parts yourself or buy the Jameco CoasterBot parts bundle that we put together with them for our CoasterBot build project. It comes with all of the major parts you need (including the Ardweeny, the Breadboard Regulator, the servos, wheels, battery connector and battery snap, wire, etc.). See the Jameco page above for complete parts list.
- If you'd like to buy just the Ardweeny and Power Regulator, you can get the Ardweeny here and the Power Regulator here.
- These instructions assume that you've already assembled the Ardweeny and the Solarbotics Power Regulator based on the instructions that came with them.
- You also need to hack your servomotors for continuous rotation. One of the CoasterBot contestants created this handy how-to.
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, you hopefully now have a functional robot body to start playing with. Next steps include shoring up the mechanical design (maybe use the spaces instead of tape?), adding sensors, and perfecting that code. Happy building!