StorageBot - voice controlled robotic parts finder

Step 6: Building the Electronics

When designing the electronics I wanted to use as many off-the-shelf parts as possible to ease construction. See the bill of materials for part numbers and suppliers. Once you buy and mount the components the wiring is basically all point to point wiring. There's very minimal soldering. You will need to solder two 10k resistors connected to pins 2 and 3 of the Arduino compatible board. You will also need to solder to extend wires from the stepper and servo motors.

The code running on the Arduino basically translates serial commands from the PC computer. These commands are then used to perform the following:

- moving the x-axis stepper motor
- moving the z-axis stepper motor
- moving the y-axis servo motor
- reading the x and z axis limit switch
- controlling the LED strip

Controlling stepper motors are very easy. Each stepper is driven by a driver board. By sending a step and direction signal from the Arduino to the driver board the motor can be made to move forward or reverse by one or more steps. 

The servo motor for the y-axis is also very easy to drive. The servo actually contains a motor driver board internally. A certain type of digital waveform is sent to the servo to make it move anywhere between the extreme clockwise and counter clockwise positions. Scope captures of this servo waveform are in the attached pictures.

Comments

[theenginerd]

what type of arduino did you use? it dosen't seem to be mentioned above is it an arduino uno? or something bigger? Great project I am starting my own version now

[TECHMASTERJOE]

nice but you made a error on your circut you say 12v+ to arduino that will cook any arduino i know of you might want to make a note of that on the pic it's only 5v crazy project i might build one 3 x larger for my home shop

[dttworld]

Thanks for looking over the circuit. Fortunately, the Arduino has an onboard voltage regulator that takes the 12 volts and converts it to 5 volts for the logic level electronics. If you look at the Arduino it has a 2.1mm plug that takes 9 to 12VDC. Here is a link for more info:

http://arduino.cc/playground/Learning/WhatAdapter

[TECHMASTERJOE]

running lol i have arduino uno smd sitting infront of me and i never even noticed LOL never used it before 95% of my projects have been LED Lighting running on 12v+ but req a pc so never ran it off battery power before i have ran a few custom boards off batter power but i built it so i know what it used

sorry for the miss read But this project is crazy i need it to go with my arduino powered CnC but my next project is auto bit changer for the CnC as i don't want to baby sit it

[dttworld]

CNCing is fun stuff. I'm building a power draw bar for my machine so I can swap out bits easily. You can see a picture of the mill I used to cut the ABS parts in the last step of the Instructable.

[TECHMASTERJOE]

if you do a diy draw bar please make a guide i have been looking into quick snap
works some what like a air hose disconnect
but power draw is much faster
what the shop bot set up back ?

[dttworld]

You can look up the power draw bar on CNCZone. Hossmachine has the design I am replicating for my X3 mill. The picture of the Shop Bot is from the Fab Lab at a Baltimore County Community College.