Terry - Lights, EL and solid Panner

Terry the robot now has headlights! While the Kinect should be happy in low light I found some nice 3 watt LEDs on sale and so headlights had to happen. The lights want a constant current source of 700mA so I grabbed an all in one chip solution do to that and mounted the lights in series. Yes, there are a load of tutorials on building a constant current driver for a few bucks around the net, but sometimes I don't really want to dive in and build every part. I think it will be interesting at some stage to test some of the constant current setups and see the ripple and various metrics of the different designs. That part of he analysis is harder to find around the place.

And just how does this all look when the juice is flowing I hear you ask. I have tilted the lights ever so slightly downwards to save the eyes from the full blast. Needless to say, you will be able to see Terry coming now, and it will surely see you in full colour 1080 glory as you become in the sights. I thought about mounting the lights on the pan and tilt head unit, but I really don't want these to ever get to angles that are looking right into a person's eyes as they are rather bright.

On another note, I now have some EL wire and EL tape for Terry itself. So the robot will be glowing in a sublte way itself. The EL tape is much cooler looking than the wire IMHO but the tape is harder to cut (read I probably won't be doing that). I think the 1m of tape will end up wrapped around the platform on the pan and tilt board.

Behind the LED is quite a heatsink, so they shouldn't pop for quite some time. In the top right you can just see the heatshrink direct connected wires on the LED driver chip and the white wire mounts above it. I have also trimmed down the quad encoder wires and generally cleaned up that area of the robot.

A little while ago I moved the pan mechanism off axle. The new axle is hollow and setup to accomodate a slip ring at the base. I now have said slip ring and am printing a crossover plate for that to mount to channel. Probably by the next post Terry will be able to continuiously rotate the panner without tangling anything up. The torque multiplier of the brass to alloy wheels together with the 6 rpm gearmotor having very high torque means that the panner will tend to stay where it is. Without powering the motor the panner is nearly impossible to move, the grub screws will fail before the motor gives way.

Although the EL tape is tempting, the wise move is to fit the slip ring first.