Monday, December 27, 2010

Wheel of Motion

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

For Christmas I received a little spending money and what do you think i spent it on? That's right! I bought the scooter wheels I've been saving for. Just now ordered them.

So how was your Christmas???


John

Friday, December 17, 2010

Belts, Smoke and Dead Buttons

Got the belts for the scooter drive today. They're smaller than I imagined.

Yesterday while I was testing the motors I had the electronics tray sitting on top of the body. I accidentally pulled a wire causing the whole tray to fall back inside the body. As I was pulling it back out, a wire cap fell off and the exposed wire touched the battery level meter causing a puff of smoke. I quickly hit the main power switch (should of done that earlier when the tray fell) and inspected everything. Luckily nothing was damaged.

Later, I powered up the sound system but couldn't get the VMusic2 to trigger. After trouble shooting I discovered the problem was with a bad signal coming from the C6C receiver on ch5. Once I moved the wiring from ch5 to ch6 everything worked again....but what was wrong with ch5? After more trouble shooting I have concluded the problem is with the ch5 button on the PS2 WiFi controller itself. A bad button. I wonder how long before the ch6 buttons stop working? Oh the good times a hobby brings.

John

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Learning to Walk

So yesterday I got those scooter motors and today I wired them up for testing. While I was at it, I, of course, made a video.



Here's some pictures.
Photobucket Photobucket

Now for the inside details.
As I mentioned in the previous post, these are 24 volt 100 watt electric motors used in the Razor E-100 toy scooters. I have them connected to a dual channel Electronic Speed Controller (ESC), specifically the Dimension Engineering Sabertooth 2X25 (picture on right), which is then controlled by the C6C receiver. These motors are the belt driven version (now discontinued by Razor and replaced with chains). I chose belts over chains because I didn't want the extra noise. Belts are already on order (the official Razor ones) but the belt driven wheels are no longer available. However, I did find a generic compatible scooter wheel that should work just fine.

The ESC has a set of 6 jumper switches to configure the ESC for battery type, controller type, and other options. I had some trouble at first setting these correctly because I was looking at it upside down. So take note. Always make sure you know which way is on and off. Once I got that sorted out, I had to flip around the wiring on the left side motor so it would run in the same direction. Don't worry, most electric motors are polarity reversible. This is important to pay attention to because when I install the motors into the feet, they'll be facing opposite directions thus the wiring must be reversed on one of them.

Once I have the belts and wheels I'll have to build a frame to mount each motor and wheel to and then mount that into the feet. I don't have all of that figured out just yet, but with dozens of examples from other builders and a little trial and error, I should be able to manage it.

John

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Christmas Present for a Droid

Lately I've been rethinking using the NPC2212 motors for my droid, mainly because they're almost $200.00 a piece. A cheaper option would be using electric motors off of those toy scooters, such as the Razor E-100. Fortunately this doesn't require changing anything I've already done. I can still use the same electronic speed controller, etc..

So I did some looking around and round some replacement scooter motors compatible with the Razor E-100 for less than $20.00. Even better is the website is offering free shipping for a limited time. Here's the link, http://www.partsforscooters.com/119-17?sc=2&category=77293.

Note that this motor uses a belt to drive the wheels. This may be a problem because Razor has discontinued belt drives and now uses chain drives for their current line of scooters. As a result, belt drive wheels are hard to come by. Very hard. So why did I get the belt motor instead of the chain? Mainly because a chain drive makes a lot more noise than a belt drive. For the wheels I plan to either find the wheels or build a home made wheel the belt can work on....famous last words... :)

Update: I found some generic wheels that are "compatible" with the Razor E-100, though not an exact copy of the original. But as long as it fits the belt it'll work. They're $40.00 a piece however so I'll have to take my time in acquiring them.

John