I was contacted by somebody who suggested I should enter our senior design project here. Seeing as how we found and used the AX-12s from Trossen Robotics, I figured this would be a great place to post.
This project was our senior design, a semester long course that requires a team of electrical and computer engineering undergraduates to design, order parts for, build, and program a piece of their choosing. We figured that, since we knew we’d be locked up in the senior design lab anyway, we should at least do something at least mildly entertaining. We were given about a $500 budget from the school.
Since this is a robotics website, I will get down to the guts and glory of what most of you are probably intested in: the servo motors. We used 2 different types of servos for this project, though in retrospect, I would probably go about the project quite differently in some aspects (I’ll revel in that a little later in this post). As I already mentoned, we did use th AX-12s for 4 of the 8 motrs (1 for each row). These provided the lateral motion. The beauty behind them is how eeeaaasssyyyyy they are to program! They provide great torque, are individually addressable on a single serial link, have tons of built-in features (torque overload detection, heat overloads, etc), and they’re relatively inexpensive. By using a larger external gear, we were able to convert that high torque into a higher lateral speed.
For more detail: Autonomous Foosball Table