Ever wanted to build a balancing scooter?

SpinnerSpinner Birmingham, UK
edited October 2003 in Science & Tech
In some slightly off topic news, some clever fellow, who obviously isn't very satisfied with public transport and other forms of getting about, like walking for example, has built himself a pretty cool balancing scooter. Hardly the first of its type, but certainly a nice piece of DIY work.

tlbonscooter.jpg
I put this scooter together in a week using off the shelf parts. Altogether it cost about $2000, or $2500 if you include the "one-time" costs of buying development kits and parts I ended up not using. It doesn't need high-tech exotic components. Wheelchair motors and RC car batteries work fine. It doesn't need high-performance DSPs or complex software. My first version of the software ran in Python on a FreeBSD workstation, using 2 serial ports to talk to the gyroscope and motor controller. The current software, now in C running in an onboard 8-bit microcontroller, is only 200 lines of code.
<a target="_blank" href="http://store.yahoo.com/lib/tlbpublic/scoot1.mpg">DOWNLOAD Video<a> (2.2MB)

The full story:
http://www.tlb.org/scooter.html

Thanks to QCH2002 for the heads up on this

Comments

  • leishi85leishi85 Grand Rapids, MI Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    pretty neat.
  • celchocelcho Tallahassee, FL Member
    edited October 2003
    wow

    i wonder what dean kamen is going to have to say about this thing...

    afterall, he acted like the segway was soo complicated something like this couldn't be done.
  • TemplarTemplar You first.
    edited October 2003
    Ever wanted to build a balancing scooter?

    omgz liek whoo hazn't!!! D:
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