project: symba

More goodness from the past. This time a solar powered symet bot from one of Mark Tilden's designs. This particular one is from Jan 29, 2004.

I replaced the hobby aluminum outer ring with lighter and thinner coat hanger wire while the inner ring has been dropped altogether.

I used a simpler wire triangle in its place. The solar cell is a Sanyo AM-5711 glass solar cell from PagerMotors.com. I mounted it on a small piece of foam for shock protection.




Symba in December of 2003 with the old hobby aluminum rings, which I need to replace.



Symba is a solar-powered BEAM Symet that I have been working on for months based on a design from Mark Tilden's BEAM Robotics research at Los Alamos. It's almost finished, and I'm really pleased with how it's turning out so far. I'll be posting an AVI of it scooting around my desk soon.



It's using a simple FLED Solar Engine I free-formed manually without a board, along with 3 3,300uf caps so hopefully it will run under my desk lamp. The rings were formed from hobby aluminum, but brass tubing also works well. The motor is from an old CD Rom drive, and the fancy inside mount is the helical recording head from an old VCR. Dimensions so far are 7 X 3cm & 49 grams (1.7oz).