Slipknot Planning Notes

The purpose behind our Turbot Study Project is to gain a better understanding of these uniquely Beam robots. The quest for learning drives us to explore different mechanical and Nervous Net designs.

Unfortunately, most Turbots on the web make use of basic Photopopper circuits. While this is interesting, it does not present us with a full Nervous Net to study. Paul T. Barton’s Flipper series of Turbots, by comparison, offer exactly the sort of structure we are looking to understand.

When Wolfgang found some BG Micro Nihon gear motors, we decided to build a replica of Barton’s Flipper. Along the way, we applied some of the lessons that we had learned from earlier robots.

Layout. As you can see by the photograph, Barton was able to neatly fit the entire circuit on a single section of perf board. This makes for a clean final product. The disadvantage is that it is difficult to tell what each component is for.

Color. We used a two-color wiring scheme on the Abcore Rover and found that this makes it difficult to troubleshoot. We color-coded the Neurons on the Fire Ant, which ended up being easier to follow. Slipknot will feature a similar color-coding scheme.

Power. Barton used two 3V Lithium batteries in series. We are using two 4.8 NiCad batteries from Solarbotics, wired in parallel for more current. This will require a battery charger. We plan to use the Solarbotics BEP charger circuit because the part count is low and we are already familiar with it.

The plan is to divide the circuit into two perf boards: the Nervous Net board and the Motor and Power board. Each Nv will have its own cluster on the Nervous Net board. This will have the resistor, capacitor, indicator LED, and color-coded wires running from the bias point to the inverter input, and from the inverter output to the LED. This layout should be simpler to build and easier to understand.

Color Coding