GPone: Scarabaeus - INTRODUCTION by C/D

Since the presentation at the MMF2017 in Turin, we are going to prepare a series of articles with the aim to describe and to announce the future features and developments of this robotic platform.

First of all, we apologize for delay days about article publishing, this is justified by the short time we have every weekend. Anyway, to improve the quality, the success and our effort in this project, we are going to ask your support even through a Patreon that will start sooner.

The project consists of three parts; the software, the hardware and the mechanical parts. In this post, we are going to introduce every part and to describe you our intentions for each one.
We're going to explore one by one in the next articles.

 

About the mechanical parts.
All parts have been printed with the Alunar R100 presented on this blog some days ago.

Take a look to our Patreon, because if you are going to participate, you can make big deals if you want to purchase the same printer we usually use for 3D printing and the same one we used for this project.

At the same time, you will help us by funding and further improving this project, all info in patreon page (coming soon).
All mechanical parts are released in Creative Commons license, that enables the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. Take a look at our thingiverse's account over the course of days to be updated about all the parts. The pictures below show of the Jansen's linkage legs with some detail and the claw parts disassembled.

About the hardware.
The following diagram shows the circuit schematic of the robot.

 

We'll discuss the details later, in this introduction we are going to show you the HW design. It's consist of the Control Unit and the Server Unit. This design is very powerful just in case you want to break up the communication layer from the actuators.

So many times, a developer brings together these two parts, but to have a separate firmware is very helpful if you want to improve the safety of software. In our case, we have a software that communicates with our own home network, so this concept is the most important thing.

About the software.
You can find on board two kinds of software, one for the Server ESP8266 based and one for the Control Unit, TI LM4F120 LaunchPad based. We must make it quite clear that it's compatible even with Tiva C Series TM4C123G, even if we cannot testing it.
These two parts communicate via UART and apply the command received to the actuators, in this case, two modified 28BYJ-48 stepper motors for the Jansen's linkage legs and one unmodded 28BYJ-48 for the claw in front of the robot.
The communications are shared under HTTP and through our Telegram bot. You receive the IP of the robot through telegram and then you can communicate with it via HTTP. These two methods aren't so practical, so we have in development other ways to assure to you an alternative to drive and to communicate with the Scarabaeus.
In particular, it would be really useful for an application via mobile or desktop app, to drive the robot more easily (of course, this is another point in development).

On top of the robot, you can find a YI Dome Camera (Xiaomi Manufactured) that can be used with proficiency in all robot movements to interact in real time the surrounding world. Also, this camera will be dealt with the future software dedicated article.

We leave you to your considerations. Please don't forget to follow us and to be on point for future Patreon in coming.