Do you will have a couple of Nomadic Applied sciences N150 robots sitting round that you’re not positive what to do with? Chances are high that you don’t, as a result of these robots haven’t been manufactured for nearly 25 years, and so they have been area of interest machines at the moment. They have been initially focused at researchers finding out robotic exploration issues, like how one can get a robotic to resolve a maze. Lately you are able to do that simply sufficient with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and an affordable robotics platform, however within the Nineteen Nineties, it required some leading edge {hardware}.
Despite the fact that you most likely wouldn’t have the great fortune to have an N150 in your spare elements bin, you’ll doubtless nonetheless discover YouTuber Clay Builds’ latest video fairly attention-grabbing. Clay Builds managed to get his palms on one in every of these robots at an public sale. Because it got here with no documentation and the corporate that produced it has been out of enterprise for 1 / 4 of a century, the one method to make any use of it was to first reverse engineer it. This could be a very troublesome process below even the perfect circumstances, however with the robotic in a nonfunctional state, it was all of the tougher.
On preliminary inspection, the N150 has a rotating turret on the prime that’s lined with ultrasonic sonar modules, which is sensible for a robotic designed for exploration. A set of three wheels are on the underside of the robotic, which will be turned for steering and are pushed by a big brushed DC motor. Contained in the anodized aluminum physique of the robotic was a slew of PCBs — every ultrasonic module and wheel had its personal PCB, and a number of other bigger PCBs have been situated within the middle of the casing.
Clay Builds tears the robotic down and goes deep into the operation, offering data that’s helpful nicely past this specific scenario. This data might be helpful to anybody that’s making an attempt to reverse engineer unknown {hardware}. In the middle of this teardown, Clay Builds discovered the motor management boards and, as a primary step in interacting with the {hardware}, linked an Arduino Professional Mini improvement board to it. After some experimentation with sending completely different indicators to the inputs of the motor controller, he was capable of drive a spare DC motor that he had readily available.
With that out of the best way, a set of very beefy batteries have been put in within the case to provide the robotic with the 24 volts that it requires for operation. Subsequent, Clay Builds wished to have the ability to interactively drive the robotic, so he wired a PlayStation controller to a Teensy 4.0 (because it helps the three.3 volt logic stage required by the controller) for enter. With a bit extra reverse engineering work, Clay Builds additionally discovered how one can drive the motor that controls the steering, then wrote a easy program to translate the requested actions into indicators to ship to the motor controllers.
After reassembling the N150, Clay Builds was capable of efficiently drive the robotic round his home utilizing the PlayStation controller. That was an enormous achievement, however there’s nonetheless numerous work to do to grasp this robotic, so you should definitely keep tuned for future movies.
N150, put together to be reverse engineered! (📷: Clay Builds)
Driving the motors with an Arduino Professional Mini (📷: Clay Builds)
Success! (📷: Clay Builds)
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