Planet Arduino

The miniscule size of this self-balancing robot makes it a cool project. It actually uses the motor and wheels from a small toy car. But when you look into how the balancing act is performed it gets way more interesting. The larger versions of this trick pretty much all use Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) which are usually made up of an accelerometer and a gyroscopic sensor. This has neither.

The black PCB seen to the right of the robot is an IR reflectance sensor. It shines an IR led at the floor and picks up what reflects back. [Sean] added this hack because the gyro sensor he ordered hasn’t arrived yet. The board has a trimpot which is used to adjust the sensitivity. You have to tweak it until it stands on its own. See for yourself after the break.

Self balancing robot builds are a great way to teach yourself about Proportional-Integral-Derivate (PID) algorithms used in a lot of these projects.

This low-resolution memory device packs in just a few bytes of data. But it’s enough to spell out [Michael Kohn's] name. He’s been experimenting with using paper discs for data storage.

His technique becomes immediately clear when you view the demo video below. The disc spins multiple times with the sensor arm reading one track. This gives the system the chance to measure the black band in order to get the data timing figured out. Once the outer track has been read the servo controlling the read head swings it to the next until all of the data is captured.

An Arduino is monitoring the QTR-1RC reflectance sensor which makes up the reading head. It uses the black band width in order to establish the size of an individual byte. Interestingly enough, the white parts of the disc do not contain data. Digital 0 is a black area 1/4 the width of the large black strip, and digital 1 is half as wide.

[Michael's] set up the generator which makes the discs so that he can easily increase the resolution. The limiting factor is what the reading hardware is able to detect.

Why should cyclists have all of the fancy toys? Bicycle computers are very common these days but you won’t find similar hardware for skateboards and longboards. [KobraX22] isn’t taking it lying down. He built this speed and distance computer for his longboard. It doesn’t use very many components and should be easy to install.

The device monitors the rotation of one of the wheels by mounting a reflectance sensor on one of the trucks. It points toward the inside of a wheel which has a piece of black tape on it. Every time the tape passes it prevents the IR led from reflecting back at its paired receiver. This lets the Arduino count the revolutions, which are then paired with the wheel diameter to calculate speed as well as distance traveled. Of course the wheels wear down over time to so frequent riders will have to take new measurements at regular intervals.

[KobraX22] went with a QRB1114 sensor. It costs less than $2 and doesn’t require him to embed a magnet in the wheel like a hall effect sensor setup would have. It also shouldn’t interfere with any other fancy wheel hacks you’ve done, like adding a POV display.

[via Reddit]