I Sold the elephant myCoBot 280 and UR to step up my game. The 280 was great to learn on, or have a desktop 6DOF arm, but it’s payload capacity was very limited. In this video I have the UR moving two pens between three locations indefinitely. Moar cool stuff to come.
Elephant mycobot 280 Arrived!
I ordered an Elephant mycobot 280 to more easily test ROS code and learn MoveIt with a scaled down version of on my desk. It is a pretty slick little device but the repeatability and the payload capacity is really lacking.
Reduce Reuse & Recycle
Most battery packs that die tend to only have a single cell that is actually bad. A lot of the times the issue is the IC and not all the cells are sill useable. So I went to a good will and asked offered a crazy low price for a whole box of batteries. They agreed and I got to cracking them open.
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After separating the 18650 cells, they each go through three tests independently. The tests determines the cells internal resistance, how much capacity it hold, and if there are any internal shorts.
Each cell is labeled with the date, the capacity rating, and it’s current charge. To be extra safe I let them sit for a month and discarded any that dropped more than 0.1 volt.
I used https://www.repackr.com/ to make sure each of the sets of ten 18650s in parallel are balanced in capacity.
Robot Disco – It Begins!
It all started with a Craigslist ad for an electric wheelchair base with dead batteries. I had no idea what I wanted to do with it but after seeing the cupcake art cars at burning man in 2019 I knew I needed to build something similar.
The machine is manufactured by Pihsiang Machinery MFG Co LTD. The posting came with all the electrics for the scoother by a company called Dynamic Controls. I tried interfacing with the Shark Controller with little luck and decided to simplify and replace all the electronics with standard robotics devices. But first we need to test out the OEM systems.