Building the DiddyBorg
Robot construction is much more straightforward than you think. Let us show you how…
T he good people at ModMyPi were kind enough to send us a DiddyBorg v2 to play with. We’re eternally grateful for this and we thoroughly recommend you check out their store next time you need anything Pi-related.
The Borg series was designed by PiBorg, brainchild of Timothy Freeburn, who explains “The DiddyBorg is a six-wheel drive robot and is a homage to the Sojourner Mars Rover”. PiBorg teamed up with ModMyPi back in October 2017. Jacob explains this collaboration: “Tim and I were both around during the genesis of the original Raspberry Pi B. Where I was off making cases, Tim was designing motor-controllers and LED thingies ( www.piborg.org/ledborg/), so when ModMyPi developed into wider reselling, Tim’s products were some of the first that we picked up.
“As the market has progressed over the years we realised the need to bring in more in-house development, and Tim realised the value in utilising our distribution network for his products. He could devote time to making more cool stuff, and we could devote more time to selling and sending. We both work well at our respective goals and get along, so it was a no-brainer to team up!”
Our Diddyborg features six powerful 12V 100RPM motors and is powered by 10 AA batteries. We’ll look at alternative power sources later. Power is distributed by the custom ThunderBorg board, which can handle 5A per motor, has a multicolour LED (useful for monitoring battery status) and we’re sure you agree looks like the business. Rather than using some complicated servo arrangement for steering, the DiddyBorg rotates by turning its wheels at different speeds.
The borgs (see below), and many other robots, are sold as build-it-yourself kits. Depending on the particular kit, this might be quite an involved process, involving small parts, soldering and possibly swearing. Building the Diddy takes a couple of hours from start to
finish, and you can find instructions at www.piborg.org/ blog/build/diddyborg-v2-build/diddyborg-v2-build
instructions. It would be silly to reproduce these in their entirety here, but do check out our general step-by-step robot building guide ( right). We’ve based it on the DiddyBorg, because we have one, but construction of other robots will follow a similar prescription.
If you can, it’s a good idea to set up the Pi as best you can before starting the build. Of course, it’s possible to SSH to the robot once it’s built to tweak things (so long as you’ve told it about your wireless network beforehand), but heavy wireless usage will sap battery power that could otherwise be used for careening around the office annoying lesser magazine teams. If you have another Raspberry Pi and nimble fingers, then you can extract the SD card post-construction and perform any tweaks on the other device.