The PulseRain M10 board is capable of a lot of things. One of them is to build a Lego Monster Truck, with PWM and Wifi Shields from Sparkfun, plus two DC motors. And here is how:

1) Get the PulseRain M10 board
https://hackaday.io/project/20493-play-fpga-like-arduino

2) Get the Sparkfun Ardumoto shield
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9815

This shield along does not have the Arduino stackable header and screw terminals (3.5mm pitch). To make the procurement job easy, you could get the Ardumoto Shield Kit instead
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13201

Update on 10/11/2017: Sparkfun just came out with a new Ardumoto shield (DEV-14129) to replace the old one used in this project (DEV-09815). The difference between those two versions are:

   a) The pin assignments are different. The new one uses pin 2 and pin 4 to control the rotation direction, while the old one uses pin 12 and 13

   b) The new one added some LEDs with 1K ohm resistors on the IO pins directly to show signal activity. However, this will cause problems for the M10 board. Because the M10 board supports dual voltage IO (3.3V/5V), so the IO output for M10 boards are OD (open drain) instead of totem pole. And the 1K ohm resistor on the new shield will pull the voltage below its threshold. So to use the new shield for this project, those 1K ohm resistors have to be removed.

3) Get the Sparkfun ESP8266 Shield
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13287

solder the connector pin head

The PWM shield needs a 5V input, that can be provided by wiring the 5V pin on ESP8266 shield to the power connector of PWM shield, and stack them together, like the following:

4) Get Two DC 3V-6V Dual Axis Gear Motor from banggood.com. Or they might cost less than $1 each if you buy them from AliExpress

solder wires to the DC motor with 22AWG solid core

5) build the steering mechanism:

6) Hack one of the DC motors according to instructions here, and attach it to the Lego Gear Box

7) Mount the steering mechanism and the DC motor to a Lego 8 x 16 plate using cable tie

8) Attach the other DC motor with two wheels. The wheels are 65 mm in diameter and 28 mm wide. You can get them from Amazon  or banggood.com

9) Attach the DC motors (with wheels) to 3 2 x 16 Lego Plate stack

10) put everything above together with cable tie, connect the DC motor to PWM shield

11) Don't forget the battery. I use a portable USB charger like the following

https://www.walmart.com/ip/ThinkGeek-Pokemon-Pikachu-Portable-USB-Charger-for-Smartphone-Tablet-MP3-Bluetooth-Gaming-Devices/184219405

Now you get yourself a Lego Monster Truck. And stay tuned for firmware/software!

Posted by Changyi at 11:46 PM

1 Comments:

• On 10/16/2024 9:32 PM,  Troy  Said

  Greaat post thankyou

   

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