Well, we have had a couple snow days here over the last couple weeks and our 6WD snow plow has been getting a lot of publicity. We built it as a novelty item and have already sold it. Fear not for those of you who still want one, just let us know what you want and we can build anything you need in plenty of time for the next winter.
Check us out on the weather channel
Weather Channel youtube videos:
Check out our youtube videos:
This remote control snow plow has been waiting for this day (OK, us too). It worked great, plowed our whole lot.
We finished migrating www.superdroidrobots.com to a new dedicated server. We are sorry for the interruption, the old dedicated server had a failing hard drive and we had to make the change without much warning.
We have added a forum. We are working on updating all our support pages on www.superdroidrobots.com and linking them to the forum so everyone can comment or add to the discussion. Look for these images on our support pages, then join in on the dissuasions…
SuperDroid Robots Support Page Forum Discussion
We are currently experiencing connectivity issues as we migrate our website to a more powerful dedicated server. The propagation process was started at approximately 7:00am EST and it will take up to 24 hours for it to propagate. We apologize the inconvenience.
Win a Free Arduino Powered WiFi Robot
See the progress of the robot build here.
We are working hard to prepare the release of the source code to GITHUB and the winner has not yet been chosen. The good news is that there is still time to enter! The winner of the contest will recieve the autonomous robot pictured above complete with Arduino and client side source code.
Please see this link to the robot’s product page for more information.
New tutorials are available.
We’ve recently added new videos, tutorials and articles highlighting the process of designing and building your own robot!
On our new How to Build a Robot support page, we highlight the entire design process in how you select your mechanical components and control system. We’ve also recently participated in an IEEE presentation on UGV System Design that is definitely worth a read!
We’ve added new instructional step-by-step videos on how to build our standard IG32 ATRs and our compact ATRs
An IEEE RAS Presentation by Jason Traud
On October 7th, 2013 SuperDroid Robot’s Jason Traud gave a presentation on the basics of UGV System design at North Carolina State University as part of an IEEE Robotics and Automation Society meeting. The presentation covered how you define and determine the scope of a project, motor and battery sizing, motor mixing algorithms, Omni-directional robotics and a case study on UGV system design using the new Trekker2 development platform.
Please see the links below for the presentation slides and presenter notes.
Here’s an inside peak into one of our side projects, the Trekker2. The Trekker robot kit was one of the original robots we sold to the general public. Now we’re looking at refreshing the robot in a big way. The Trekker2 Development Platform will support four mecanum wheels on a heavy duty aluminum chassis. This isn’t your garden variety “PCB Robot” platform our competitors are selling. The Trekker2 is definitively more powerful and sturdier than any other low-cost offering.
The Trekker2 will also offer a color touch screen for user input and will be powered by the Arduino platform. Our goal is to provide a powerful robot that can fit into most people’s budget that teaches the end user how hardware and software come together to make robots happen.
Stay tuned!
FingerTech’s 2.125 inch Mecanum Wheels
The four Mecanum wheels are each connected to a separate motor with independent control. The robot can move forward, backward and turn just like it would with four regular wheels. The configuration of rollers at 45° also allows the robot to translate sideways, and through a combination of movements, drive in any direction – even while spinning!
Adjacent corners of the robot use mirrored wheels so that they can freely roll outward from the center. This splits the force into two vectors, one forward/backward and one right/left. When the wheels on one side are spun in opposite directions, the forward and backward vectors cancel out while both sideways vectors add up. Doing the reverse with the other two wheels results in four added sideways vectors.
Control can be accomplished with a microcontroller or simply using an R/C transmitter! You can use two channel mixers, a 4-channel Mecanum drive mixer, or your own programmed PCB.
For more information about control and usage of mecanum wheels, please see our Vectoring Robot Support Page
SmartGPU2 by Vizic Technologies
SuperDroid robots is an official distributer of Vizic Technologies’ SmartGPU2.
The SmartGPU 2 is a powerful easy to use, intellectual property, graphics, audio, touchscreen and full datalogger processor embedded in a state-of-the-art ARM Cortex-M3 chip; this is mounted on a board with a touchscreen color LCD. It’s aimed to help developers to create advanced Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) in a very easy way, the Smart GPU 2 processor doesn’t need any configuration or programming on itself, it’s a slave device that only receives orders, reducing and facilitating dramatically the code size, complexity and processing load in the master host processor. It features high end FAT32 format data management functions (Data Logger) to create even more advanced applications in just minutes, not days.
The Smart GPU 2 offers a simple yet effective serial interface UART to any host microcontroller that can communicate via a serial port(Arduino, Raspberry PI, mbed, PSOC4, PIC, Atmel, Freescale, STM, FPGA, PCs(RS232), even 8051 and low end 8 bit microcontrollers. All processor functions are received using simple commands via the serial interface. Smart GPU 2 processor can bring graphics, audio, touch, etc to any application or project without the need of having experience in handling LCDs and graphics algorithms.
SmartGPU2 has all the functions of the best seller “SmartGPU1″, but its now 20-30 times more faster + Audio capable(CD quality) + Video Playback(60fps) + LFN(long file names) + JPG images support(decompression) + 16Kb embedded EEPROM + integrated RTC(real time clock) + new geometry functions + TONS of new features!!!
We can guarantee that this is the most advanced yet easy to use Graphics Processor you’ll find on the market… …You’ll love it!