Balancing robot

Balancing robot with printed wheels and structural parts. It uses a Arduino Uno, accelerometer/gyroscope, and a etched motor/servo PCB shield that I made.

The board has the H-bridge, which can control two DC motors or one stepper motor, accelerometer/gyroscope, and two servo connections.

Here's a video of it in action

The final robot is quite a bit different from the first prototype. You can see the progression of this project here: www.jddorweiler.appspot.com/electronics.html#robot

I've wanted to make a balancing robot for a while but I was always turned away by the cost of all the parts. I tried to avoid using any expensive electronics or motors and instead tried to use common parts that other might have lying around. This is pretty much my first arduino/programming/PCB project so I'm sure there is room for other to improve it. Using servos was a cheap alternative to much more expensive geared motors but they're also a bit slow. This means that the robot can only recover from small pushes.

I got a lot of the code and good information was found from arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1284738418/all and kerrywong.com/2012/03/08/a-self-balancing-robot-i

If your making the PCB and using a different accelerometer board, make sure to check the pins. They're probably not the same and the one I used. This would be easy to change in the Fritzing file though.

The code is here github.com/jdorweiler/BalancingRobot

and the 3d printer files are here http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:25531