Robotics Tutorials

[IanW]

This summer I wrote a few tutorials on the website Instructables about the technical aspects of building a robot. The five tutorials are meant to help teams that have graduated a strong group of seniors rebuild and relearn the knowledge they need to build a competitive robot.
The tutorials are:

• Motor and Gearbox Design
• Introduction to Manipulators
• Control System Basics
• Implementing Manipulators
• Making 2-Speed Custom Gearbox

I made these tutorials as part of an internship at Autodesk. This is just one example of how they have really stepped up their involvement with FIRST at their Portland office within the past few years.
I hope you find them informative, and thanks for checking them out!

[AllenGregoryIV]

These are really great resources. Thank you for posting these.

[F22Rapture]

Fantastic work. Any chance you could bundle these into a pdf(s) to use and distribute? Instructables requires a pro account to download the article.

[IanW]

Sure, the attached zip file has pdfs of all five of them.

[Michael Hill]

Took a look at the motor tutorial. Pretty well done. Any inductance data on motors? I can't seem to find much data online and I can't be bothered to buy an LCR meter.

[jwallace15]

Your tutorials have very in-depth coverage of FRC. Being my rookie year, I didn't know there would be so many things involved with a robot! Obviously, I didn't think it was going as simple as make a frame and attach motors. I knew there was going to be some complexity in the construction of a robot, but not this much! So thank you for making these tutorials- they showed me what robotics was all about!

[stinglikeabee]

Mind if we post this set of resources to our FIRST resources on this website <http://growingstems.org/?subtopic=teamsupport>?

Thanks for posting

[inkspell4]

Was the question by stinglikeabee ever awnsered

[Wing]

Thanks for the great resources! I even learned some new things reading through them all. I will have some of the members on my team read them over if they can.

[Starke]

Originally Posted by IanW

This summer I wrote a few tutorials on the website Instructables about the technical aspects of building a robot. The five tutorials are meant to help teams that have graduated a strong group of seniors rebuild and relearn the knowledge they need to build a competitive robot.
The tutorials are:

• Motor and Gearbox Design
• Introduction to Manipulators
• Control System Basics
• Implementing Manipulators
• Making 2-Speed Custom Gearbox

I made these tutorials as part of an internship at Autodesk. This is just one example of how they have really stepped up their involvement with FIRST at their Portland office within the past few years.
I hope you find them informative, and thanks for checking them out!

Ian has joined FRC Designs to provide the robotics tutorials on the site! Looking forward to continue to provide resources to FIRST. Check out the link below for Part 1 of the series. Thank you Ian!

http://www.frc-designs.com/btd.html

Matt

[Ether]

Originally Posted by IanW

Control System Basics

Digital Signal: A digital signal has only two states: on or off. Robot components that communicate with a digital signal generally do so by varying the frequency at which they alternate between on and off.

A digital signal has a discrete number of states. A 1-bit digital signal has 2 states. An 8-bit digital signal (whether parallel or serial) has 256 states.

A frequency-modulated signal is an analog signal (unless the modulation is intentionally limited to a discrete set of valid frequencies).

Likewise, a pulse-width-modulated signal is an analog signal (unless the pulse width is intentionally limited to a discrete set of valid pulse widths).