Has anyone added moving parts to a GoPiGo - a little arm, for instance? a spring-loaded one-shot ping-pong ball shooter? anything? i’m trying to figure out what it will take to add and control another motor, and what motor might be light enough and pull a small enough amount of power to give the GoPiGo an actuator or 2.
Thanks
hey Coralreefk8, we have a few we’re working on, but we don’t have anything for sale yet. You have a few options:
1). You can use the microservo on the GoPiGo for anything you like. Right now we have it configured to turn a sensor around on the front, but you can take the servo mount and use the servo for whatever you like.
2). If you want to add a motor, you can look at one of the Seeed Grove motor controllers. I think they have a few that are I2C controlled. These should be accessible From the Pi, through the GoPiGo.
Hope that helps. What specifically are you trying to work on right now?
John, thanks much, this is useful!
What I’m working on – I’m a mentor for an FRC robotics team, developing intro to robotics classes/workshops for our team members and kids in general. We want to use the GoPiGo as our teaching platform. For programming, it looks super. For assembly, a good start if it doesn’t prove too delicate (12-year-olds, tiny screws…). For mechanics, however, we need to add devices (which I’m pretty sure will require a larger platform with more widely-spaced wheels – no problem and a good lesson - and auxiliary power). The soccer-ball herding prongs are a good start, and I’m looking into a spring-loaded ping-pong ball shooter. We can start with a kicker, an arm, a climbing hook… that aren’t on a moving robot, but eventually we need to put the pieces together.
We’re particularly interested in using the GPG because we’re working on modifying our FRC robots to use a RasPi instead of the standard RoboRio controller, and it would be sweet to train our students on this platform from the beginning. (One of our mentors developed the nav-X XMP navigation sensor [http://www.kauailabs.com/category/products/], and he’s the one who suggested we check out the GoPiGo in the first place.)
I can post here to let you know how we progress.