Attachment action

After a bit of a delay actually doing things, now entering the phase of actually testing some solutions. 

First up is the Shepherds Pi herding solution. The chassis is working well and to get the basic herder fitted just required some bolts, power and a USB cable. This wasn't just a sudden event and the interface has undergone a bit of refinement.

What looks to be the final interface is to run attachment microcontrollers from USB via a hub, with a separate power supply to run motors and servos, putting the power conversion on the attachment to optimise for the particular attachment, standard power supplied being 12V.

This is a picture of the shepherding attachment, controlled by a Pico on a Kitronik control board connected to the arm servos with a small buck converter power supply and power display. Also shown is a handle to aid picking the chassis up as it's now getting a significant amount of handling. The control board is a bit over specified here but in the next iteration will have to run two stepper motors.

The shepherding attachment has gone through several phases, and the one shown is good enough for basic positional testing using dead reckoning. Here's a video of a basic operation.

Some erratic movement on the arms due to controller initialisation signals, but this is a good test of a sheep 'fetch'.

While the arms do a good job with the sheep, they do need to do more and so the turbo-shepherd version is in construction and testing. Here's a video of it in test mode. 

Here a stepper motor is now giving lift to the arm to allow it to be move up and out of the way, open and close the gate, as well as potentially pick up recalcitrant sheep!

With the herding going well, the Hungry Cattle challenge is almost complete.

The montage above shows the feed dispenser attached to the chassis. The feed hoppers are attached to a turntable mounted between the wheels of the chassis. The robot feeder drives up alongside a trough, the turntable rotates a full hopper over the trough and dispenses feed. The robot then moves on to the next trough, meanwhile the hopper rotates the next hopper into position. Once feeding complete, the hopper turntable rotates back to a central position for refilling. The controller here is a Pico on a dedicated bit of stripboard to run three servos and a small stepper. 

Finally, a bit of dimension checking. The rules say it all has to fit withing the marked rectangles, so here we are, fitting in!

Picture with arms extended

and then with arms parked.

May need to tidy a few wires up!!!! 

That's it until next time, when we'll have some remote control via a PS3 controller, a dog whistle and maybe even some voice commands.....come by Shep!