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Review by R. Steven Rainwater Help support robots.net by purchasing this book now from Amazon.com Title: Intermediate Robot Building Author: David Cook ISBN Number: 1-59059-373-1 Publisher: Apress L.P. Number of pages: 442
List of chapters: Building Modules2. Comparing Two Types of Homemade Motor Couplers and Common Errors to Avoid Comparing Two Homemade Coupler Technologies3. Making a Fixture and Drilling Solid Rods for a Coupler Gathering Tools and Parts4. Finishing the Solid-Rod Motor Coupler Installing the Coupler Setscrew5. Building a Motor Inside a Wheel Encountering Danger: Bent Shafts Ahead6. Understanding the Standards and Setup for electronic Experiments Reading Schematics7. Creating a Linear Voltage-Regulated Power Supply Understanding Voltage Regulators8. Making Robot Power Supply Improvements Bulking Up the Input and Output Capacitors9. Driving Miss Motor Why a Motor Driver?10. Driving Mister Motor Driving Motors with MOSFETs11. Creating an Infrared Modulated Obstacle, Opponent, and Wall Detector Detecting Modulated Infrared with a Popular Module12. Fine-Tuning the Reflector Detector Tuning In 38 kHz13. Roundabout Robot! Examining Roundabout14. Test Driving Roundabout Preparing for the Test Drive15. If I Only Had a Brain Considering the Motorola KX8 Microcontroller As an Example16. building Roundabout's Daughterboard Converting to a Two-Story Configuration17. Adding the Floor Sensor Module Sensing Brightness with Photoresistors18 Cooking Up Some Robot Stew Making MusicAppendix - Internet References Index Intermediate Robot Building, picks up where David Cook's first book, Robot Building for Beginners, left off. It assumes you understand the basics and have built at least one robot from a kit. The book delves into some of the common problems that face robot builders working on more complex robots built entirely from scratch. The book focuses primarily on hardware issues such as machining metal parts, connecting wheels to motors, controlling motors, and building robot power supplies, briefly covering microcontrollers and sensors as well. This book provides far more detail on the hardware aspects of robot building than any other I have seen to date and is worth picking up if you want to learn more about hardware. If you've browsed the table of contents above, you may wonder why four chapters of the book are spent on connecting wheels to motors. To quote David, "Until people actually try to build a robot themselves, they don't realize that one of the more difficult tasks is finding a precise and reliable way to connect a motor to a wheel". Speaking as someone who is primarily a software hacker, I can certainly vouch for the difficulty of solving seemingly simple hardware problems like mounting wheels, especially without proper tools or experience. The book offers several solutions and describes each in a detailed, step-by-step way with plenty of diagrams and photos. I particularly liked this book's promotion of standard SI (metric) units, which are used everywhere else in the world, instead of the medieval system still favored in the US. So you won't have to measure your robot's speed in furlongs per fortnight while using this book! The book also promotes the use of modular robotics. By creating drive modules, motor control modules, power modules, logic control modules, you can assemble your robot from the modules rather than having to build the entire robot as a single project. The modules you build can be improved or re-used to create other robots. The modules described in the book are used to create a robot, called Roundabout, that avoids walls and obstacles using IR sensors. One convention adopted in the book may seem a bit strange at first. All the schematics in the book use a mix of normal schematic symbols for some components (e.g. capacitors, zener-diodes, transistors) but represent other components iconically (e.g. resistors, photo-diodes). This can be a bit confusing initially. The author explains his reasons early on for this and another exception to modern schematic technique, the old-style use of a "jog" to represent crossed wires that do not connect. David's experience is that beginners find these wiring diagrams easier to understand, experienced robot builders often prefer them to formal schematics, and he believes his diagrams reduce the chance of mistakes. It's really a minor issue and experienced builders used to contemporary schematics should be able to adapt easily enough. Overall, the book provides lots of practical information to help the reader over the difficult areas of building a homebrew robot. |
David Cook is webmaster of the popular 
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