Thingiverse - JDD's Things

Balancing robot with printed wheels and structural parts. It uses a Arduino Uno, accelerometer/gyroscope, and a etched motor/servo PCB shield that I made.

Here's a video of it in action
youtube.com/watch?v=LAWjUlzAYf0&feature=plcp

The final robot is quite a bit different from the first prototype. You can see the progression of this project here:
jddorweiler.appspot.com/electronics.html#robot

I've wanted to make a balancing robot for a while but I was always turned away by the cost of all the parts. I tried to avoid using any expensive electronics or motors and instead tried to use common parts that other might have lying around. This is pretty much my first arduino/programming/PCB project so I'm sure there is room for others to improve it. Using servos was a cheap alternative to much more expensive geared motors but they're also a bit slow. This means that the robot can only recover from small pushes.

The PCB was designed using Fritzing fritzing.org/ with help from fubarlabs.org and code is at github.com/jdorweiler/BalancingRobot

The board has the H-bridge, which can control two DC motors or one stepper motor, accelerometer/gyroscope, and two servo connections. The PCB isn't required but I did it for fun. The three iterations of the robot used a DC motor, stepper, and servo so I though it would be nice to make a board that can handle any of those.

I got a lot of the code and good information was found from
arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1284738418/all
and
kerrywong.com/2012/03/08/a-self-balancing-robot-i

If your making the PCB and using a different accelerometer board, make sure to check the pins. They're probably not the same and the one I used. This would be easy to change in the Fritzing file though.