Introducing Tigerbot

Panic panic panic, must pull my head up out of the code and start blogging!

It’s been an eventful 18 months for the Metabot team.  The balance of the team moved from our old home at Metaswitch to a new company, Tigera.  We couldn’t resist a name change so I’d like to introduce Tigerbot….

(It’ll be orange and black striped by the big day, we promise!)

The picture above shows the bot’s bare bones before we added the motor drivers and power circuitry. Lance’s new 3D printer has been getting a good workout, churning out the new chassis, wheels and attachments.

Just in case there are any PiWars organiser’s reading, the bot’s a lot further along by now, of course!  Not long after the above photo, Lance had the bot to “remote control car” stage:

This is the traditional point for him to lose interest move on to building whizzy attachments while the code monkeys on the team get to work.

Joking aside, “remote control car” is a huge milestone:

  • chassis printed
  • power electronics in place to drive the motors, Pi and sensors
  • Propeller hat mounted on the Pi; this little board gives us a fast little micro-controller to do hard real time motor speed and servo position control; a big hat tip to John who wrote all the Propeller spin code for Metabot II, which we’re using largely unaltered
  • interconnect board soldered up, exposing the I2C bus, which we use talking to the Propeller and sensors
  • remote control connected; we’re using a DualShock 4 controller again paired over Bluetooth
  • It’s a bot!  IT WORKS!!

Now, the rest is “just code”…